Windows XP will never die

From: TG Daily.com July 13, 2010


Microsoft originally said that new owners of Windows 7 who wanted to downgrade to XP would only have until 2011 to do so, but now the company has changed its mind and extended support for the old operating system until 2020.



That's right. Windows XP, an operating system that is already almost 10 years old, will apparently still be relevant for another 10 years.

"We have decided to extend downgrade rights to Windows XP Professional beyond the previously planned end date at Windows 7 SP1," wrote Microsoft in an official blog post. "Going forward, businesses can continue to purchase new PCs and utilize end user downgrade rights to Windows XP or Windows Vista until they are ready to use Windows 7."

Because users did not seem to be overly outraged about Windows 7 the way everyone was about Vista, it seemed perfectly fine to cut off the remaining life of Windows XP without too much haste. And for the majority of individual computer owners, that probably wouldn't have been a problem.

However, what is a problem is that 74% of businesses still use Windows XP, and for a lot of them, the cost of upgrading all of their machines to Windows 7 is not financially tenable. Thus, companies risk having old computers with Windows XP and new computers with Windows 7 which would fragment their network and make it impossible to streamline systems.

It is as a result of that statistic that Microsoft will now continue to allow downgrades to Windows XP for people who purchase Windows 7 Professional through 2015, and through 2020 for people who purchase Windows 7 Ultimate, according to a report from Computerworld.

However, as of yesterday, Microsoft ended all support for Windows XP SP2, so anyone who still wants to be covered by Microsoft support will at least have to move to XP's Service Pack 3.

SOURCE

Mmm we will be on Windows 10 or whatever by then

I think it's ridiculous that many schools still use XP. If they don't want to pay for new operating systems, they would even change to Ubuntu, which is even easier to use than XP nowadays. It wouldn't be impossible, 'cause only software that Finnish schools are using are text processing (Word) and other office tools.

I'm glad I have a new reason to keep my old P4 alive for many years to come. If I start looking now, I may be able to find a couple of old rambus sticks in a landfill somewhere in the next several years.

Anyhoo, it will probably run pretty good on a 16 core processor and 64 G of ram.

Make it an Ubuntu server.

Well for the average home user XP does everything I need, I am only going to upgrade to 7 as I want to, not because I need to and some of my hardware is getting near end of life in any case. Having said all that I could theoretically stick with XP forever.

I have been a XP user for the longest time, never had Vista and went to W7 and never looked back.

I think they could still end up with driver complications if they try to download some of the newer hardware to XP.

I think that in some ways, it's good, in some ways, it's not so good. For businesses that are financially strapped, it's a good thing. Unemployment is at a nearly all time high in modern history, forcing those who are still keeping jobs for people to buy new computer systems, when the ones they have are working fine, accomplishes nothing. The companies would have to make tough decisions, upgrade their perfectly working computer systems, and lay off many employees. This is not good, not only for the US, but worldwide.

These companies spend far more for their computers than the consumer does, has an IT department to maintain them, and many of their 5 year old ones are as good as the ones that we buy with tons of crap on it. There is a huge difference between industrial computer systems and ours. Why force them to upgrade when some of their computer equipment will last until 2020?

On the other hand, the consumer market is a complete different one. More and more of today's OEM systems are throwaway systems, they will last through a couple of generation of OS's (five to six years), they start breaking down (by design), and when it costs more than it's worth to fix them, new ones are bought. We do not have an IT department to maintain our computers, we must either learn to do some work ourselves, or pay out of the butt for a shop to do the work for us.
Fortunately, we have a forum so that we can advise one another, but when that processor or MOBO breaks, that's some serious cash.

But as far as XP goes, I have it, run it some (as well as Win 2K), it still works fine, as long as your hardware is working fine, you don't really have to upgrade, especially if your other devices are still in working order. Many of those devices won't run on 7 (many Canon products falls in to this category), so why force an upgrade on anyone?

Windows 7 is selling 7 copies per second, those who wants (or needs) to stay with XP, I see no problem with that at all.

But one thing that hasn't been reported, is how long XP will remain supported. April 8, 2014 was supposed to be the cutoff, there's no way an OS can go unsupported until 2020 and expect to be usable. There will have to be at least one or two more SP's, and the usual monthly round of updating. This is going to be very interesting to watch unfold.

Cat

Two very important lines here that most people ignore. You MUST either buy a new PC with Windows 7 Pro or Ultimate (or just the OS's) and then DOWNGRADE to XP to recieve the support so this will not save businesses ANY money at all. The only possible reason for this is businesses that have legacy programs that cannot run in anthing but XP and there is no option to upgrade thoes programs.