Yes, the Windows XP OS is dead. Today is the last day the OS will be officially shipped by Microsoft and I can’t help but feel a tad bit sad that the OS has been finally put down. I have used the OS for a long time, too long I must say and it did the job pretty well. I hate to see it go like this, especially when it is at the top of the table and probably giving it’s younger flashier brother a run for it’s money. But like all things good, this too must come to an end and balance must be restored. It’s a pity the way things panned out and though there have been rumors that the OS might have one last gasp of breath left and somehow the “cruel” echelons of power at Microsoft will indeed put the aging OS on a ventilator, those are just that, rumors.
While the OS will remain an integral part of my desktop for some more time, it seems the time has come near to say a·dieu to XP after all. Lets see what really ends up taking it’s place, for the time Xubuntu seems to be the most likely contender, but you never can tell.
When would Microsoft stop supporting XP is important to indicate the extinction of the OS.
The corporate industry still relies heavily on XP and migration to Vista seems to be a costly affair considering both performance and money. Recollecting the move from the heavily used WinNT 4 servers to Win2000… though Microsoft had stopped officially supporting WinNT 4, the corporate industry was slow in accepting the new server. Microsoft then continued support for WinNT 4 at a charge.
The most important point to note in case of the shift from XP to Vista is the hardware requirement for Vista. It’s no more a light OS. The OS demands faster hardware and more memory. Though Microsoft tries to impose Vista on its users, the move to Vista is surely costly. So I think the XP should stay around for pretty decent period.
I have done too much Vista bashing on the blog. The fact is I have given up all hope with that OS 😀 . ( My experience with Vista Entry 1 Entry 2, and Entry 3).
The corporate world doesn’t want to change. Who would? Vista is a RAM guzzling monster which does nothing extraordinary in particular. The questions asked are Does it run faster?… No. Does it provide something radically different than XP?… No. Does it automatically increase productivity?… No. Does it cure world hunger, end the oil crisis, stop global warming?… No. OK then why the hell do you want to update then? Ah ha DirectX 10, games 😉 . Unfortunately the corporate world is not interested in hard-core gaming now is it, or at least some of them don’t 😀 .
Vista has been nothing but headache for game deployment. Before the service pack came out the game ran about 10% slow on Vista, or in some cases even worse and, yes, even on newer machines. Sometimes it ran far to slow probably due to buggy drivers. With the SP1 installed, the situation is somewhat better, but still XP tops in performance hands down.
Yea, on older machines, the situation is far worse. Anything that has less than 1.5 MB ram is a “dead duck” under Vista. I might just well skip Vista altogether and wait for Windows 7. Wait! I can’t I have to port the engine to DirectX 10, 10.1, 11 😥
Vista provides one thing for Microsoft – a way to force people to upgrade later. That includes the new DirectX, i.e. the whole gaming sector.
Vista was never designed to truly become a new generation OS.
It was a part-time OS where people will jump to the next Microsoft OS.