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Windows XP: The OS That Won’t Die Gets Yet Another Life Extension

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microsoft_windows_xpResponding to Enterprise and business customer concerns, Microsoft is now going to be extending the life of Windows XP into 2011. The previous life extension took it into 2010 (6 months after the expected release of Windows 7), but it now looks like there will be an 18 month window for Windows 7 Professional and Ultimate customers who may used to downgrade to Windows XP. Unless Windows 7 SP1 comes out before that. Microsoft announced that 18 months or the delivery of SP1 whichever comes first.

According to this Computer World article this latest XP life extension came about after a Gartner analyst, Michael Sliver took   Microsoft to task over the previous 6 month time frame.

8 Comments

8 Comments

  1. blash

    06/18/2009 at 11:05 am

    I guess there’s a pool going somewhere that says that Vista will end up being EOL’d before XP? Or at least they’ll be EOL’d at the same time?

    This means that XP will have been available for sale for 10 freakin’ years. That’s quite a long lifespan in the tech world if I do say so myself.

  2. SDreamer

    06/18/2009 at 11:17 am

    I can’t understand why businesses want to stay with an older, more vulnerable operating system. It’s those business that cannot adapt to the changes, and take advantages of these changes that will be left behind. Those who accept changes and use it to their own, will be the ones to prosper later on. Hate to be in the year 2020, and businesses are still on XP and everyone else is on something else by then. I assume a good chunk of the consumer market is already on Vista, and after Win7, will be on that as well, with XP being a minority among them, and businesses then struggling to adapt to what the consumer wants, instead of taking early adoption while the consumer is still adjusting to it.

  3. AKO

    06/18/2009 at 12:11 pm

    Can you imagine trying to retrain a 60 year old woman who knows very little about computers to use vista…The benefits of vista are just not enough.

  4. GoodThings2Life

    06/18/2009 at 1:32 pm

    @SDreamer… a few points to your argument…

    1) I’m not sure how UAC makes Vista less vulnerable than XP, and beyond UAC, a fully patched XP system is just as protected as a fully patched Vista system or a fully patched Win7 system for that matter. An OS is only as secure as its least competent user AND/OR the first exploitable, unpatched hole that is discovered.

    2)It’s not about adapting to change. It’s about adopting changes that are intelligent. Vista isn’t a better choice than XP from an IT standpoint. It may well be a great OS on its own, but when it doubles my support call times because of hassling with UAC (only as an example), it’s not a viable solution.

    3) It’s not about adapting to change, it’s also about staying compatible with the systems and services in place today while still being compatible with the apps of tomorrow. The only apps being designed EXCLUSIVELY for Vista/Win7 are ones developed by Microsoft so far, and I’ve found far more vendors in my experience that are still NOT Vista-compatible let alone Win7-compatible. Now in my world, Win7 and XP Mode are a great solution (despite XP Mode’s current beta-flakiness).

    4) You’re dead wrong about majority of the market being Vista. Earlier this week (I believe at ZDNet) I saw a study that 60-65% of the entire OS market is still XP, and 20-25% is Vista. Sorry to burst your bubble on that one.

    That said, as an IT professional, I am wholeheartedly and anxiously awaiting the release of Windows 7, which I’ve been testing since January. I’m very exited about it, and despite my own acceptance of the “Wait for SP1” mentality, I am very gung-ho about moving forward immediately upon its release (pending budget approvals, of course, lol).

  5. GoodThings2Life

    06/18/2009 at 1:39 pm

    @AKO… I can, because I work with people like that everyday!

    “Why do I always have to click Continue/Allow/OK? Is it supposed to do that? Did I do something wrong? It said to contact my administrator…”

    That said, I have demonstrated Windows 7’s interface to the most die-hard techno-idiots here, and when I showed them that they can now use ONE ICON in ONE PLACE to access not only their program but also their files, and most of them thought it was the greatest idea they’d ever seen. I literally had someone ask:

    “Wow, it really took them this long to come up with this idea?”

    Change isn’t always easy from an end-user perspective, but it helps when those of us in IT can present it in a friendly, intuitive, and usable manner.

  6. SAM

    06/18/2009 at 2:10 pm

    We have not switched because we don’t want to have to
    buy/upgrade new programs, printers, and so on just to run Vista.

    XP runs perfectly fine for our companies needs

  7. DataCabbitKSW

    06/18/2009 at 6:18 pm

    GoodThings2Life: Working in IT myself I can both feel your pain, and completely disagree with some of the sentiments. UAC should not trigger for users unless a program is trying to do something it requires admin access for, or a User is attempting something similar. Installations, driver changes, system file moving… all of these things should not be happening with users in a corporate, IT supported environment. Properly written software will not need to modify itself every launch nor write things to the Windows system folders. UAC _does_ make the system more secure in that it gives users that half-a-second time to think about allowing something or not. It is just like asking for the password to gain admin/root privilege on a Mac or Linux box. Same idea. However, for the longest time, developers wrote all applications in a sloppy manner expecting that users had admin privileges by default, and usually they did not error out gracefully. Vista forced a bit of change in the industry so that developers started following security guidelines. This is a good thing. It extends in Windows 7 where UAC is tuneable to allow or disallow more things by default as well as when to ask for permission. I agree at start, it increases your support load, but by far, it sure lets you know when somebody or some software is doing something it shouldn’t. In a security concious work domain, workstations don’t allow normal users admin access. So even in Windows XP ( and 2000 as well) these programs would have all sorts of problems because they assumed you had access, not checked if you did and asked for it.
    I will agree with you on the XP Mode virtualization in Windows 7 will be needed for legacy software and is a good solution. I also agree that most businesses won’t immediately pile onto Windows 7. However, many will actually put real thought into prepairing to do so, or at least integrating new machines with it into their system environment.

  8. Ben

    06/18/2009 at 9:16 pm

    Madness? THIS IS WIN XP!

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