Thread: xp pro being discontinued?

Grunt, you're not alone with your Vista Laptop issues.

We elected to provide a laptop for our son who attends one of SA's most respected High Schools. The school allowed this on the one condition that we provide a laptop with XP. They would not allow a Vista machine at all, and still don't.

Personally, I think we are seeing the result of Microsoft building such a large business on an operating system. They rely heavily on the income it generates, and each new version has to impress the pundits or it's seen as ho-hum. As a result, the backroom boys work themselves into a frenzy changing things so it seems 'new', even if the underlying code and functionality is substantially the same as the last version. Part of these changes are to move the access to the functionality around so the users need 'retraining' to do what they knew how before. Vista and the new Office are prime examples.

One of the anti-competitive activities that has hit the press recently is this whole ODF vs Office XML file format wrangling that has been going on. It's just crazy.

woodbe.

woodbe, your son's operating system is not a reflection of problems with Vista, but of SA Education's desire to maintain a consistent desktop operating environment across all their schools. This is common in many large organisations, where a decision is made which is held constant for a number of years, typically 2-3.

By the way, did you see that ISO just endorsed OOXML as an official standard? That's a great win for fans of inter-operability.

Originally Posted by Ron Dunn

By the way, did you see that ISO just endorsed OOXML as an official standard? That's a great win for fans of inter-operability.

I think that was what I was talking about, but not in quite the same glowing terms.

woodbe.

* 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.

Ron - thats the Beta version of the Windows XP SP 3 verses the Vista SP 1 Beta. So it's comparing two Beta versions.

"Vista, both with and without SP1, performed notably slower than XP with SP3 in the test, taking over 80 seconds to complete the test, compared to the beta SP3-enhanced XP's 35 seconds."

But I do agree with you that this state of affairs wont last; I fully expect some extra code to be added to the XP SP3 release to slow it down to more Vista-acceptable speeds (which then have the chance of being pulled out by some enterprising haxx0r, in the same way that Creative purposefully crippled functions of its Vista sound drivers only to have them restored in a hack by Daniel_K.)

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.

Contradictory? Are you using a Microsoft dictionary? The only area where they diverge is in just how much more work is needed before Vista is up to scratch.

Conclusions from the articles:

"Still, even comparing Vista SP1 to XP SP2, it’s clear that Vista has a long way to go before it can beat its older sibling."
From http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=1390&page=3

"Windows XP SP2 provides better overall performance, and remains the place to go for dual-GPU solutions."
From http://au.gamespot.com/features/6188289/p-2.html

And here's a new one that looks at general office applications, not just games:

"So, onto conclusions. Looking at the data there’s only one conclusion that can be drawn - Windows XP SP2 is faster than Windows Vista SP1. End of story. Out of the fifteen tests carried out, XP SP2 beat Vista SP1 in eleven, Vista SP1 beat XP SP2 in two of the tests, and two of the tests resulted in a draw."
From http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=1332&page=6


"The Windows Vista + Office 2007 combination represents the largest jump in overall CPU and memory footprint ever recorded on the Windows platform. Not only is the new combination "fatter" than previous versions, it's also a great deal slower on comparable hardware. In fact, during OfficeBench testing we found that Vista + Office 2007 took over twice as long as the slowest Windows XP derivative: Service Pack 2 + Office 2003."

From http://www.xpnet.com/iworldtest/


And this!!! OMG!!, teh commie Linux hippy-bearded h4xx0rs are in our base, steelin' our gpu cycles!!! On an alpha release of teh terrorist operating system!!!eleven!!!!

"Using the Quadro FX1700 512MB* and the latest display drivers, Windows Vista wasn't the decisive winner, but the loser.

Ubuntu 8.04 Alpha 5 with the 169.12 driver had overall produced the fastest results within SPECViewPerf.....In the rest of the OpenGL tests, Solaris Express and Windows Vista were fighting for second place. In six out of the nine tests, Windows Vista was in last place."
From http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...ion_perf&num=5

(*note - the NVIDIA Quadro FX1700 is a mid range professional graphics card for serious applications, not gaming, RRP around $900.)

Or back to office productivity suites, how about a picture: (lower numbers are better)

(from http://exo-blog.blogspot.com/2007/11...am-office.html )

I wish you computer geeks would speak English. is a h4xx0rs?

Also, could you explain (in English) why anyone would play games on a PC when you have all those game consoles out there like Playstation et al? Seems to me to be a much more trouble free environment if you're into make believe?

My Dad once asked me to get him a PC. I said "what do you want it for?" "To play games". So I got him a Playstation One. He's onto his third upgrade and has never looked back.

On the Microsoft thing, most of the gibberish you guys are raving on about is beyond me. I have two major problems with Microsoft - getting a straight answer when you have a problem - and the change for the sake of change approach that appears to prevail.

I use Office 2007 - there are still things I used to do that I can't work out in the new interface.

I develop in VS 2005 - there is a problem with symbolic files in the debugger under certain circumstances. Other people have had the same problem. I've posted on forums and the resolution seems to be to delete everything and rebuild your project, which works some of the time. Other times, you need to reboot. Just try to get a support person to admit it's a bug.

I have lost more time than I care to think of with problems like the above - many of them due to the fact that they have brought out version x of something that we've all gotten used to and changed everything and it takes time to get your head around the new way. Switching from OCX to COM and now to .NET represents literally hundreds of hours of lost time getting up to speed. When COM came out it was going to be the platform of the future. What's next? Who knows. I can think of very few things that I can do now with .NET that I couldn't do before with COM, just in a more circumspect way.

I know change is good - but only when it's productive.

A cynical person might suspect that the change is only to differentiate version x from version y and make people think they need it.

SilentC, let me know your Office problems and I'll help you out. Also, would you like a trial version of VS2008? That'll let you see if your build problem is fixed.

Change is a dilemma for a software company. Take SQL Server, for example. There was a five-year gap between SQL2000 and SQL2005. Users complained that a new release was too long. Now they're complaining the gap betwee SQL2005 and SQL2008 is too short.

Personally, I'd prefer change to be a little less frequent and a little less radical (ie, how many UI technologies do we have now?) ... but one thing I've learned by actually seeing it happen is that all of this change is driven by user/developer pressure for the next new thing.

On the change thing, yeah I realise that. It's just that over the last 10 years I've built up an in-depth understanding of ASP/VB/SQL/XSL which has been my bread and butter. I have a vast library of common routines and a method that I follow when developing something new. Then along comes .NET and I'm faced with a decision - do I continue with the old way, which works fine and is well understood; or do I throw all that away and start anew?

It's fine to make these decisions based on philosophical musings, but at the end of the day, some poor sucker has to pay for my early stage fumblings.

We're a partner, so we get all the latest software on CD or DVD as soon as it comes out. We're pretty much expected to be at the forefront of MS development, so it's a given that we are early adopters - one of the first group of companies in Australia to have Vista-certified software.

So now I have a rule to develop new stuff in .NET, but I still use my COM stuff day to day. I tend to use VB for most things, and I must say that having OO support in VB now is a big improvement.

Everyone is going to have a different perspective on change. For me, it often just means more work for little return. I'm learning something new, which is good, but in terms of functionality, as I say not really anything I can do now that I couldn't before.

As for Office, I don't have anything specific. One example in Outlook though - I used to be able to view the email header by clicking View - Options (I think). Where has that function gone?

View eMail Header:

* Right click message row in Inbox
* Select "Message Options" (near bottom of menu)
* Header text is at the bottom right of the Message Options form

Don't you agree that the learning problem you describe is typical of the IT industry in general? I've had to re-invent myself roughly every 5 years to stay in demand. Languages I've discarded include FORTRAN, PL/I, RPG, Pascal, and (reluctantly) C. Same with databases, same with communications technologies. On one hand it represents a tremendous waste of intellectual capital, but it is part of what made it interesting to go to work each day.

Ah, there it is. I got out of the habit of right clicking messages back when I was connecting via a VPN over an ISDN connection and it took about 30 seconds to show the popup menu. Thanks.

I started out programming Assembler on IBM mainframes. I know that the hardware platform has changed, but I doubt that the language has changed all that much since 1989. But yeah, it's true, I have also sold books that I paid over $100 for at a garage sale for 50 cents each because they're of no use any more (Borland C++, Visual Basic 5, Windows 3.11).

Just to think of the hours and dollars I spent over the years and then multiply that by god knows how many thousands of people in this country alone, only to chuck it all out. All the floppy disks, the CDs, the books, the 24k modems, 20Mb hard disks, parallel port expansion cards, 15" CRT monitors. All for what? So people can spend more time sitting on their backsides surfing the net and playing games.

But I suppose it beats working for a living

Originally Posted by silentC

I wish you computer geeks would speak English. is a h4xx0rs?

Also, could you explain (in English) why anyone would play games on a PC when you have all those game consoles out there like Playstation et al? Seems to me to be a much more trouble free environment if you're into make believe?

h4xx0rs = hackers in leet speak.

Leet speak (l337 5p34k) was as a way of getting around word filters in chat rooms - you would type your naughty text in an obfusticated form so it didn't get you the automatic banhammer.

Here's some of the Lord's Prayer in leet.....

0ǔr $¥$@dM!n, \/\/|-|0 ©|-|!££$ !n |-|34\/3|\|
Our sysadmin, who chills in Heaven
ph34r3d β3 7|-|¥ |\|@m3
feared be thy name
†|-|ÿ p\/\/n@g3 ©0|\/|3, †|-|ÿ $©r!p7$ b3 d0|\|3 !n /earth @$ i7 !$ i|\| /heaven.
Thy pwnage come, thy scripts be done in /earth as it is in /heaven.

Leet speak is mostly used in an ironic or satirical way, especially after eternal September.

¡spɹɐʍʞɔɐq uo pɹɐoqʎǝʞ ǝɥʇ ʇnd oʇ ǝʌɐɥ noʎ 'sıɥʇ ǝʞıl ǝdʎʇ oʇ pɹɐɥ ʎllɐǝɹ sʇı 'ʎɐʍʎuɐ puɐ

I play on a PC because I prefer a keyboard and mouse to a controller - works better with first-person shooters for me. And even if I could come to grips with a controller, I'd still have to have a computer for all the other stuff they can do that consoles can't.

That's why we always had a separate room for the network support geeks. They're freaks!

BTW - Vista seems to be working ok, with the notable exception of Outlook. Takes forever to download larger files, and I had to change from an IMAP account to a POP3 before I could get the sodding thing to work. Tried to use the old Office 2003 Outlook originally, but the whole system went belly up and had to scrub 2003 from the new laptop and reinstall Outlook 2007. I hope that's the last of the problems.

Incoming, is this a brand-new installation of Outlook, or did you copy across older .PST and/or .OST files?

If you copied older files, or cached a local copy of your Exchange mail store, Outlook will spend a lot of time performing your initial search index.

If you haven't found it already, the instant search feature is one of the joys of Outlook 2007.

Ron,

You're going to be in trouble with Bill when he finds out you've been helping people with his software without taking a credit card number and warning about $150 minimum charges first. Give it a break, you're not even making them wait!



woodbe.