Re: "It sounds exciting. It is."
Nope it doesn't, (but that might be subjective).
Support for Windows XP ends on 8 April 2014. Much as you hate to let go, sadly the time has come. We can help you make the transition to an XP-free future by helping to plan a successful migration. Join Dell Software’s Scott Lutz and Tony Lock from Freeform Dynamics to find out how you automate application compatibility, …
Please tell Dell I will let Windoze XP go when I abandon the PC platform totally - something which is happening incrementally, year by year.
Secondly, please ask The Reg management how hitching your wagon to a Dell sales-promotion might be considered good journalism?
This post has been deleted by its author
Funny... I and many others at the time said that we'd never use XP because it's too much like Fischer Price and a triumph of eye candy over function.
It turns out we were wrong. If you can't use Windows 7 for the distracting eye-candy or (dare I say it) Windows 8, the problem is with you, not the OS.
This post has been deleted by its author
To be honest I have no issues with Win 7 compared to XP, I think it's a decent OS. However W8 makes me want to throw cow pats at Steve Ballmer for releasing such a half finished and ill conceived POS desktop interface that's still not fixed in 8.1
However having moved over from XP years ago to OpenSuse this is rather academic for me personally, there are just some things about windows which require serious work before I get a wow "that's good" factor from MS again.
1) The update mechanism - oh how painful
2) Split screen file manager - come on MS, FFS take a look at KDE dolphin
3) Stop fucking setting the default profile to full Admin, when are you going to get it through you thick heads and sort out this crappy policy.
4) Proper division of user and system space.
"3) Stop fucking setting the default profile to full Admin, when are you going to get it through you thick heads and sort out this crappy policy."
After twenty years of getting it wrong, I think we can be quite certain that MS will never get that into whatever thick heads are running the show there.
Microsoft's thinking appears to be that if you are so uninformed that you can't set up a separate account then rather than try to teach you how to use the device they will simply give you full rights and let you flounder. Microsoft's product managers do not care about end-user security. They never have done. This OOBE choice is the proof.
Well ...
"Everything they have released since then is eye-candy ridden entertainment software that happens to run other apps, if you're lucky - and with a huge performance penalty."
My guess is that most Reg readers know where this is all heading ...
Eventually we/you will only have 'pay per use' applications to be able to do anything in a PC or whatever shiny, new and trendy hardware the powers that be manage to impose on us, with (maybe?) the exception of browsers with permanent advertising, all of which will (of course) need absolute shitloads of bandwidth, memory, processor muscle and money to run because it will only happen over the web and in the cloud .
Why?
Simply because 'we' let it happen.
That's why ...
This post has been deleted by its author
Agree entirely, quite frankly I couldnt give a shit that MS are dropping support for XP whenever that is, it quite frankly dosnt matter. The only time Ive ever had to call support, was when their authentication server failed & I was invited to purchase another license - how utterly crap is that?
The Internet is heaving with support for XP & for years I turned off automatic updates applying only essential ones when necessary & found that third party software provided much better security. Once XP goes, so does Microsoft its successors are clumsy fatties in comparison & I have neither time nor patience to learn 'new ways to do familiar tasks' - as stated in a previous post it should be 'familiar ways to do new tasks' which gained over 100 thumbs up.
... about $9700 from *my* self-employed pocket for new licenses to CAD/CAE software I use every day that either won't run under Win 7 or will run only in that shitassed XP sandbox. The products I have - some of which date back to Win98 days - are paid for, do everything they need to do, and are stable.
I installed Win7 and spent a day or two installing what software I could, where I could, then spent a month or so attempting to operate in that environment. Luckily I installed 7 as a dual boot, so now 7 just sits there wasting disk space while I continue to use XP. Unfortunately that's not a long-term solution. Either I:
- Live with the risk of running XP
- Hope that the good Mr. Ballmer might gift me some licenses as he departs
- Update licenses and live on rice and beans for a while
In a Virtual machine maybe. It takes a lot of work just to get XP SP3 into a new machine (slipstreaming various chipsets and SATA drivers into both modes of the installer), but that is only because manufacturers still write drivers for their generic counterparts, Windows 95, not so much.
I suspect you were just being snarky.
...they change it. M$OFT and everyone else should pick an interface and be done with it! Make no changes to the user interface until and unless it becomes absolutely necessary. DO YOU HEAR ME? Make no changes to the user interface until and unless it becomes absolutely necessary. We are not here discussing automobiles or housing. We are here discussing production tools. A wrench is a wrench is a wrench. Don't try to make it a fancy wrench just because you can. Just hand me a wrench when I ask for it in a form that I can readily recognize, please!