Miscellaneous Operating Systems/Hardware

...any tears?

Oskar45 wrote: ...any tears?

Yeah, I'm still running it

No problems here. Microsoft should drop support more often.

I'm waiting in amusement to see what happens in China where pirated XP is still a huge thing.

jwp wrote: No problems here. Microsoft should drop support more often.

Ever since I'd conquered that silly phase of dabbling in Windows 3.x programming, I began to abhor more and more everything MS (although the organization I'd worked for utilized almost exclusively Windows in various flavors for servers & desktops). Alas - shame on me - my laptops all run XP still.

Still workin' fine for me.

In my environments, XP and W2k survive on some virtual machines, mostly kept around for the odd need to access or convert data from old programs that have long been on the extinction list. For my Windows hosts, they've all been running Win7 happily for quite a while. I expect that situation will continue until around January 14, 2020, i.e. Microsoft's Win7 extended support end date .

I'm not the one who has to update all machines at work to Win 7 this year. So, no tears.

Windows 8 is out for a few years now, don't understand why people would bother 'updating' to something out-of-date already... But I don't use more than typical PC stuff... Matlab, some proprietary apps to interface simulink with CAN networks, simple forms for interfacing... MS office, etc... Power users probably need more power. The touchscreen support is also much better.

Ideally we could just use Real Unix but we have big investments in windows software.

Oskar45 wrote: ...any tears?

we do have windows users here?

guardian452 wrote: Windows 8 is out for a few years now, don't understand why people would bother 'updating' to something out-of-date already...

In many corporate environments, the cost of training and transition support is seen as being significantly more for Win8 than for Win7. Especially for businesses that already have a significant Win7 footprint, it probably makes more economic sense to consolidate everyone on Win7 for the next few years, effectively skipping Win8.

I think a lot of IT execs expect Microsoft (particularly under a new CEO) to revamp its Windows strategy, and they suspect that Win8's adoption has been rocky enough that whatever follows Win8 might take some different approaches to the user interface. From that perspective, one could argue that Win8 is "out-of-date", while Win7 is the version with legs, so skip 8 entirely and just wait for whatever comes next.

Win8 does have some nice enterprise features that Win7 lacks, but those features don't seem compelling enough to justify the migration costs for many businesses.

... same as our corporate masters at $WORK halted the Vista rollout after a few thousand desktops, and decided to wait and move to Windows 7 instead. There will be some exceptions issued to run Windows 8 in specific circumstances, but the general herd of corporate users will skip to whatever follows, depending more on EOL/EOS deadlines, enterprise licensing costs, viability of alternatives, and whatever they print in InfoWorld or the Gartner report-du-jour the next time some C-level exec needs to look busy...

My $WORK expects us to go pick up something from best buy or wall mart and expense it. I don't think they even have win7 computers on the clearance shelf anymore.

There was a lot of talk about the Bring Your Own Device concept, with and without allowing the employee to expense the device, maybe just a fixed reimbursement amount. But they weren't ready for BYOD yet at the beginning of this year. They'd run a large pilot doing that for phones, but there were still over 50,000 corporate-owned Blackberry devices in use.

The place has on the order of a quarter million employees, so it's not a small matter either to implement or change direction on any of these things...

guardian452 wrote: I don't think they even have win7 computers on the clearance shelf anymore.

That may be true, but larger businesses have any number of arrangements for procuring Win7 machines from major manufacturers, while individuals and small businesses still can order Win7 machines online through Dell, HP, etc.

Another thing is that some of the more heavily regulated industries, like pharmaceuticals and healthcare, have regulatory requirements to validate and document the accurate operation of certain processes and software. Introduce a new OS, and you need to go back and revalidate your software, update your documentation, and do mandated staff training, all of which can be tedious, disruptive, and expensive, while yielding benefits that are not necessarily noticeable.

One other comment: from my perspective, and it is one shared by a lot of IT and business execs, Windows 8 is not something that most users were asking for, especially business users. Windows 8 is something that Microsoft wanted, to add revenue by forcing an artificial upgrade cycle and to create a new mobile/tablet strategy. The former doesn't show much consideration for its customers, and the latter, while very important, was botched in its execution and didn't need to have much to do with its desktop/laptop strategy beyond questions of integration. Instead, Microsoft decided to go for fusion of desktop and mobile use cases into one platform, rather than integration between two different use cases. Again, that's not to say that Windows 8 is without its merits, it's just that the implementation doesn't align well with most customers' priorities.

http://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualizati ... pe-from-xp