Thread: xp pro being discontinued?

Originally Posted by silentC

Are you for real?

Have you never been in a room with a Ford driver and a Holden driver?

You might want to rethink that analogy a bit mate....

No, I don't need to rethink it. It is the exact same kind of sillyness. Marketing types spend all kinds of money to foster that kind of blind loyalty. It means they can make the most minor revisions and the smallest of changes and still have people lining up for the "latest and greatest" offering. The worst thing is these people honestly don't realise they are being played...

It is the exact same kind of sillyness.

Sure it is. I just think you might have found a less ironic analogy to illustrate your point than fighting over which car is best. Football teams, perhaps? No, that wont do. Brand of tablesaw... Hmm, help me out here. Beer? Umm, brand of boot.

In fact, you could argue that debates over Holden vs Ford or more legitimate in that they are actually fairly closely matched rivals in the market place, more so than say, Microsoft and... who are the other guys again??

So in essence, your point is that expressing loyalty to ANY brand is silly. Is that it?

Originally Posted by silentC

So in essence, your point is that expressing loyalty to ANY brand is silly. Is that it?

To a point, it is. Especially if it is blind loyalty. But really, if aren't going to read what I've written and put it in the context that I've written it, I don't care. My original point seems lost here, so no biggie.

Well, it's not really a voluminous post full of observations. I've read it a couple of times and I repeat it here in the context in which you gave it:

"I do find it amusing though when you find people that are overtly Pro MS. I really can't understand that, as after all MS is making money out of selling you something. They didn't give you an OS out of the goodness of their hearts, did they? I like my car, but I don't feel the need to tell everyone it is the best car ever and you are wrong if you don't agree."

You can't understand why people are biased towards a particular brand given that the manufacturer makes money by selling its products, rather than giving them to you.

Not very hard to understand at all really, or at least I thought not. But you seem to be suggesting that your point was something different. So obviously there is some deeper meaning buried in there that is beyond me. If it's beyond me, it may be beyond others (I can't be the only dumb one here).

I don't really find it surprising or hard to understand at all that people behave this way over MS, given that they behave that way over so many other things (some examples of which I listed), so what exactly IS your point, if I have missed it?

Well I use XP pro, but my FIL only uses macs. He has never experienced the blue screen of death.
I think everyone accepts that windows is not the best operating system avaiable. It is the most popular and has the most software but dies the most.
Macs dont crash like windows, nor does linux and even the unix we used to run this very old CAD program on.
Not sure I'm adding to the debate, just wanted to waffle as I'm not at work today.

This crashing thing has me intrigued. I sit in front of a PC all day every day. I can safely say that I've not had a 'blue screen of death' on this machine or it's predecessor ever. In fact I've not seen one at all since I started using Windows 2003.

My wife's PC runs XP and as far as I know, she's not had one either. I've heard her complaining on the odd occasion about the machine 'locking up' but it usually rights itself after a minute or two. I've never investigated what she has been doing at the time. I've noticed that Firefox and Acrobat Reader can sometimes cause those sorts of problems on my machine, but they never result in a crash.

Now back in the days of NT and Windows 3.11 it was a different story. I find that the O/Ss these days are a lot more stable and easy to get along with.

I can make XP crash

I am a bit of a tweaker I guess. Every so often I will tweak a part of the OS to make it work more like how I want it to work. Sometimes that works. Sometimes I get a phone call at work: "You've been playing with the computer again, haven't you? How do I make it go?" It keeps life interesting. To be honest, with that approach I suspect I'd like Linux, but it won't run WordPerfect, and any OS has to be able to achieve that.

Peter

I suspect that the majority of people who complain the loudest about Windows are of the type who like to 'tweak'. I can't for the life of me see what's worth lifting the hood for. I know I'm just a lowly developer, but for what I do day to day, the machine out of the box with the factory settings works fine for me. Tweaking things falls into the category of fixing things that aren't broken, and any IT person should be more than familiar with that truism.

So, you may have seen that support flow chart that starts like this:

Is it broken? -> No -> Leave it the hell alone
| ..........................^.....................^
V ..........................|......................|
Yes........................|......................|
|...........................|......................|
V...........................|......................|
Did you touch it? -> No.....................|
|...................................................|
V...................................................|
Yes................................................|
|...................................................|
V...................................................|
Does anyone know you touched it? -> No

etc..

You should print that out and hang it up near your desk. Tweaking is something people used to do back in the days of DOS and carburettors. Leave it the hell alone

Windows XP Significantly Outperforms Vista, Tests Show

Windows XP trounced Windows Vista in all tests, regardless of the versions used or the amount of memory running on the computer, says Devil Mountain Software.

By Paul McDougall
InformationWeek
November 27, 2007 11:49 AM

Here‘s the link to the article with lots of reader comments - http://www.informationweek.com/news/...equestid=69266

In the latest Mac versus PC ad, that put-upon Windows guy quietly concedes he's "downgrading" from Vista to XP. He may have good reason: new tests show that the older XP runs common productivity tasks significantly faster than Microsoft's newest operating system.

Here‘s a link to tv ads for your amusement - http://www.apple.com/getamac/ads/

Researchers at Devil Mountain Software, a Florida-based developer of performance management tools, have posted data from their most recent Windows performance tests -- and Vista, even after it's been upgraded to the new Service Pack 1 beta package, is shown to be a laggard.

"The hoped for performance fixes [from Vista SP1] that Microsoft has been hinting at never materialized," said Devil Mountain researchers, in a blog post summarizing their results.

The researchers compared patched and unpatched versions of Vista and XP running Microsoft Office on a dual-core Dell notebook. The results revealed the time taken to complete Office productivity tasks such as the creation of a compound document and presentation materials.

Devil Mountain researchers ran a mix of tests comparing existing versions of the operating systems -- the original Vista and XP SP2 -- and versions that had been patched with the latest updates -- Vista SP1 beta and XP SP3 beta. Tests were also run on machines with 1 Gbyte and 2 Gbytes of memory.

Windows XP trounced Windows Vista in all tests -- regardless of the versions used or the amount of memory running on the computer. In fact, XP proved to be roughly twice as fast as Vista in most of the tests.

For instance, notebooks running Vista SP1 took more than 80 seconds to complete a series of Office tasks in the OfficeBench test suite, while notebooks running Windows XP SP2 completed the tasks in just over 40 seconds.

What's more, the tests showed that the resource-hungry Vista gobbles up most of the additional RAM added to a computer. By upgrading a notebook running Vista SP1 from 1 Gbyte to 2 Gbytes of memory, "we managed to achieve a 'whopping' 4% improvement in OfficeBench throughput," the researchers noted.

The test results are the latest black eye for Windows Vista -- an operating system that Microsoft unveiled in January amid much fanfare but which has since failed to capture the hearts and minds of computers users in both the home and business markets.

A recent InformationWeek survey found that 30% of businesses have no plans to upgrade their computers to Vista -- ever.

Many users have voiced worries about Vista's resource requirements and compatibility with older applications and peripherals. The concerns have prompted some PC makers, including Dell and Hewlett-Packard, to reintroduce XP as an option on certain systems.

Microsoft rival Apple is seizing on the Vista backlash to promote its new Leopard operating system. Its latest ad is an attempt to portray Microsoft as a company that's tone deaf to user concerns about Vista.

"Ask not what Vista can do for you, but what you can do for Vista," says the PC guy, posing as a politico. Given the latest research, an increasing number of Windows users may end up seeking a new candidate.

Originally Posted by silentC

This crashing thing has me intrigued. I sit in front of a PC all day every day. I can safely say that I've not had a 'blue screen of death' on this machine or it's predecessor ever..

Sorry, I have NFI about vista and have only ever had virus problems with xp which otherwise I am very happy with

Macs dont crash like windows

I was picking up on this. There seems to be a perception that Windows crashes all the time but that hasn't been my experience.

I have never seen Vista either. I use Windows Server 2003 and switched to that from Windows 2000 which I used for a number of years prior to that and before that NT. I develop for server platforms, so I develop on the target OS. Even though I've been told XP is the same under the covers, it costs me nothing to run Windows server.

Careful, SilentC ... you'll get bombed by countless opinions-masquerading-as-facts (otherwise known as "articles").

I have not met any user of Vista who complains that their productivity has suffered as a result of the new operating system. I have not met any user of Vista who has direct evidence of unreliability. I have not met any user of Vista who has found it to be less secure than its predecessor. All the users I meet are completely happy with their switch.

I'm sure readers of this thread have noticed one thing very clearly ... those posting the most commentary against Vista are those with the least actual hands-on experience of the operating system. What's that old saying? Empty vessels make the most noise?

I stand by my commitment - if you have a Vista problem, bring it to me and I'll help to get it fixed.

http://blog.changewave.com/2008/03/p...ads_south.html


Hey Ron...
Could it be that those who claim to be at all "satisfied" with any Windows version have never really tried a Mac (see attachment).

Kicking over the empty cans and pizza crust I stagger to my feet.

I would like to thank M$ for a life I was happy to be come accustomed too.

I remember back when I had to write a print driver for every printer the user had.
A video driver for each video card.

Oh how nice it was to change over to windows. Only one environment to work with.
It was not 100% but beat the cr.p out the prior system.

Now I only had to work with one environment for 95% of the possible customers. Oh the joy.

No Windows is not perfect, XP explorer goes walkabout and uses 90+% of the processor if you have a couple of instances open.

So what!

Vista is just another progression, probably not a main one as little is gained against the cost of replacement.

Lets wait for Vista2 and see.