Thread: xp pro being discontinued?

Onya Ron fer stickin up fer MS

I didn't say MS was not fair,
I made a general comment about the future of unscrupulous people.

And I don't forget if it wasn't for MS packaging a browser in their operating system the internet as it exists today would probably have a lot less users.

OMG! We have a MS versus the rest argument happening on the woodwork forums!

The posts from each side are getting longer and longer!

Sorry to break it to you guys, but you will both never convince the other party that you are right, and this is the internet where long posts get treated with TLDNR (Too Long, Did Not Read)

SilentC is right. Windows is great for making an income, it creates a lot of employment. In fact, it's testament to the saying 'nice guys come last' and 'the best do not always win'.

Me? I use them all, I have to in my job, and yes, I make money out of windows too, but I make more out of linux, and I'm typing this on a Mac.

woodbe.

Just found this thread, great stuff! Plenty of truths, half truths and misinformation all round.

I've built a career supporting MS products and they certainly make some great software... and some not so great software. I started off on the desktop and IMO nothing beats MS Office, staggering array of functionality that one person would use a fraction off, another person uses a slightly different fraction, but little real bloat.

These days I work in the dark back rooms supporting applications using a variety of MS and non MS products, so I guess you could call me a MS convert. But I'm typing this in Firefox, I hate windows explorer (I use Directory Opus), run open office at home (cause I'm cheap and don't need cool stuff here) and dual boot to Ubuntu (started looking at linux when Vista got bad reviews - impressed!) and I think .Net rocks. So I pick and choose based on requirements at the time.

Anyway, I think there are some amazing open source software projects and pay stuff out there. Maybe MS is like McDonalds, some hate it, some love it, the rest can enjoy it when it's there.

Milar.

"Paranoia. Obfuscation. Deliberate mis-statement."

Where? Unlike Microsoft, I don't indulge in FUD-casting. I'm not aware of any misstatements in my content or links; please be specific so I can provide better resources.

"Matters of Microsoft's competitive position in the industry are the subject of regular and on-going legal argument"

...and have lead to Microsoft recently being fined US$1.4 billion for defying sanctions imposed on it for anti-competitive behaviour...

"Microsoft was the first company in 50 years of EU competition policy that the Commission has had to fine for failure to comply with an antitrust decision," Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said in a statement.

"A DirectX 10 card is not obsoleted."

I didn't say it was.

I said "Vista SP1 I hear you say?...whoops, that requires new hardware to support it!" - which was a rephrasing of the headline of the article I was referencing - "Vista SP1 needs new hardware" published at http://apcmag.com/vista_sp1_needs_new_hardware.htm

Allowing for the usual development cycle of games, I would be surprised to see any being developed with 10.1 as a minimum requirement, especially as one of the two players in the graphics industry (NVIDIA) has apparently stated that they are not supporting 10.1 but are going straight to 11. (...this one goes to 11...its...one louder...)

I have not read any benchmarks yet suggesting that there has been a great improvement in graphics performance in Vista SP1.

http://www.news.com/Windows-XP-outsh...3-6220201.html

"New tests have revealed that Windows XP with the beta Service Pack 3 has twice the performance of Vista, even with its long-awaited Service Pack 1."

Also in the same article:

"XP has proved to be more popular than its younger sibling, with the first six months of U.S. retail sales of box copies of Vista 59.7 percent below those of XP's in the equivalent period after its release."

Or maybe:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=1390&page=3

"On the whole, applying SP1 to Vista makes little difference to most games. Seven out of ten of the games tested produced frame rate averages which were lower under Vista than XP SP2."

How about:

http://au.gamespot.com/features/6188289/p-2.html

"Windows Vista with Service Pack 1 is a step in the right direction. Gaming performance increased in comparison to a fresh installation of Windows Vista. Windows XP SP2 provides better overall performance, and remains the place to go for dual-GPU solutions."

"Public announcements regarding the requirements for DirectX 10.1 were made in August 2007 - eight months ago""...drivers for third party hardware and the responsibility of the third-party hardware manufacturer."

The graphics drivers carry the WHQL (Windows Hardware Quality Labs) certification from Microsoft; this means that either 1) certification is not a reliable guide to quality, or 2) being the single cause of nearly 50% of all Vista crashes is within the acceptable bounds of 'quality' .

"Earlier in this thread you gave the appearance of being a committed Windows user, if only of XP. I'm pleased you corrected that illusion."

My first post in this thread stated "I use Windows primarily for games." to explain why I still use XP.

While I agree that many Windows users probably should be committed, I fail to see how my statement marks me as a committed Windows user. If anything, it shows that I use it for frivolous recreational activities.

I was answering the question "Which version of Windows?"; to do this, I stated what version of Windows I used, and why, and provided links to relevant information so that the person asking the question could balance sales and marketing rhetoric against fact, and come to their own decision.

I'm sorry if reality does not agree with Microsoft's quarterly earning needs.



If you want a real committed Windows user, try this guy....

This thread has become The Never Ending Story

Master Splinter, it is your selective quoting and mis-quoting that is a problem, especially when you know those quotes to be false and repeat them as "evidence" for your claims.

Vista SP1 does not require new hardware. ONE FEATURE of SP1, possibly to be required by some games which might be released in future, may require a new video card. Nothing to do with Vista - the video card, as designed and sold by a third party, does not have a suitable graphic processing chip. If you bought the right card in the first place, you get full functionality.

The Vista-vs-XP gaming articles you reference are an interesting, contradictory bunch. Once again, you appear unable to read past an attention grabbing headline, or unwilling to correctly represent the article.

* The news.com article tested the first BETA release of the driver. BETA releases always contain debugging code, are not necessarily optimised, and almost always run significantly slower than a production release.

* The zdnet.com article had mixed results. Some games were marginally slower under Vista, some games were faster. In all but one case the difference was negligible.

* The gamespot article is a great example of your selective quoting. In fact, that article is overwhelmingly positive about Vista, with just one exception - dual GPU gaming, where it concludes by saying (in the very next sentence to that which you quoted) "the new OS is getting close to dethroning Windows XP".

I can't wait to see the purple glow in the sky, emanating from your face when Vista-only games are released as developers concentrate on the current version of Windows, rather than tying their code to the past.

Let's face it, you get a warm feeling in your panties by hating on Microsoft. Because your feelings hover somewhere between religion and fantasy, you're never going to accept any facts other than those which you can twist to fit into your distorted view of operating systems. You don't have specific experience on which to base that feeling, you rely entirely on selectively mis-quoted articles for "support".

I offered to meet with you today to demonstrate how well Vista works, but that was probably too much of a foray into reality for you to handle. I'm not going to continue to dissect and correct your Frankenquotes, but if you'd care to post direct, personal experiences I'll help you to work through any problems you might be experiencing.

Keep it real

I'd like to add one cautionary note to this thread.

While Vista is a great operating system, home users may experience one problem when upgrading their existing system: third-party device compatibility. Sadly, some manufacturers have not stepped up to their responsibilities and released drivers for Vista.

This MAY affect older printers, cameras, scanners and sound cards. Most will work, some won't.

In order to help fellow woodworkers, if any forum members are planning to upgrade to Vista and worry about device compatibility, drop me a message with your device make and model, and I'll see what I can do to help.

Ron.

Where is the popcorn-eating smilie? On MacDuff.

Originally Posted by Honorary Bloke

Where is the popcorn-eating smilie? On MacDuff.

It ok, you can join DavidG and myself on the bean bags with the pizza and beer. David officially pulled up a beanbag a couple of pages ago

I first started using MS products in 1979. The humble basic interpreter on the TRS80.

I used to be very much a Microsoft fan. Some of the MS products I have used over the years were ground breaking. Certainly from a developers point of view. Quick Basic 3.0 with it's incremental compiler and VB 1.0 were just outstanding products for their time. I also think that XP is a good operating system. MS/SQL server is a great product even though they weren't the original developers.

MS have dropped the ball in a number of ways over the last few years.

.Net in theory is the bees knees. C# is a better language on paper than Java. It's a pity some of the implementation has been less than successful. There are so many bugs in the standard libraries that it's joke.

Visual Studio is a nightmare. It is slow, bloated and buggy. I don't know how they could have actually release VS 2005, it is so bad. We have a large application that caused 2005 to haemorrhage. I use Eclipse for Java development and it is better in almost every way. It is also free.

Vista. I know some people have had success with Vista. I am not one of them. I bought a new laptop in June last year. I struggled with it for 7 months. It would lock up, constantly hammer the disk drives and generally behave badly. Just starting up would take 1GB of ram. I gave up on it and went back to XP. My life is better.

Office 2003 works just fine. It's a little bloaty but that's ok. I kind of like Outlook. Office 2007 is the pits. I don't know what they were thinking. I found it really hard to use or more importantly how to do things. I could never find anything in the help so I would resort to using Google to find the answers. I'm now back using 2003. We get all our MS products for free as we're partners. If I had to pay for it I'd use Open Office.

IE 4.0 was so much better than Netscape 4.0. Faster and more stable. MS just dropped the ball by not continually making it better. I found IE7 to be ok but I still prefer FireFox. I do a lot of HTML/CSS/JavaScript development and I really, really wish that IE was more standard compliant.

Originally Posted by echnidna

This thread has become The Never Ending Story

Particularly after my serious and learned advice earlier.....what ya gunna do

keep watchin of course

Grunt, would you care to share some experience of errors in the .NET libraries? That isn't my experience - I write audio software in c#/.NET - but I'd be happy to help you resolve any problems you might be experiencing.

PM me the name of your Partner Manager. I'll also arrange some training/support where necessary.