XP has a glimmer of hope

[nickao]

Check out this link below. Microsoft is re-thinking whether they will discontinue the XP operating system as soon as they had planned.

XP has a glimmer of hope

Nickao

 

[joraft]

Microsoft is re-thinking whether they will discontinue the XP operating system as soon as they had planned.

In the article Steve Ballmer says that they made the decision to discontinue XP so soon because the vast majority of new computer buyers are choosing Vista. I wonder if he realizes that most computers vendors no longer offer the choice of operating systems on most of their models.

John

 

[Dan Lyke]

In the article Steve Ballmer says that they made the decision to discontinue XP so soon because the vast majority of new computer buyers are choosing Vista.

I've had two days recently where if I could have walked into chain store and gotten a modern laptop with XP on it for circa $1k, I would have. Vista compatibility issues have cost me hours, if not days, of work.

I need to talk with my primary client about trying to move some of their stuff to Vista (It's harder than you'd think), and I'm glad that the chip supplier whose development environment I play with seems happy to support Linux for their tools.

On the other hand, I've billed a few days helping people to make their applications Vista compatible, so if you subscribe to that economic school that believes that vandals breaking windows grow the economy, then I guess it's a good thing...

 

[nickao]

It is really tough to get software to "work" with Vista. I have  64 bit Vista and I had to just toss a bunch of software that is not even backed up by the software makers. They do not intend to ever back it up but just come out with entirely new software., I am also finding support from some venders is getting eliminated for XP also.

Vista is inevitable, bite the bullet now and pay for newer software designed for it. Eventually it has to happen.

Nickao

 

[Ned]

Vista is inevitable, bite the bullet now and pay for newer software designed for it...

And hardware. 

Ned

 

[joraft]

Vista is inevitable, bite the bullet now and pay for newer software designed for it. Eventually it has to happen.

I do accept that, Nick. We must accept change, whether we like it or not. But I've always found that it's the pioneers that take the most arrows, so I tend to hold back a while until the territory is safer.

Besides, I've just gotten my Windows 3.11 all tweaked and stabilized. No real need to rush into a new OS now.

John

 

[JayStPeter]

I "bit the bullet" and went to Vista when I got a new laptop over the winter.  I'm kind of sorry I didn't just upgrade it to XP right away.  It was a lot of effort and occasionally just hangs up on me.  On a positive note, the most worrisome thing for me was a microcontroller development system and it was absolutely no problem.  The biggest effort was actually many of my Microsoft programs that I had to $$upgrade$$ to be able to use (office and visual studio).  Studio was terrible, even with the upgrade to the latest .Net there was a brutally painful patch that takes about two hours to download and install to get it to work with Vista.  MS is their own worst enemy.  There are a couple other apps I had to do some stuff to get them to work, but nothing nearly as painful as all the MS software that I specifically bought to make the change easier.
The news on the next gen OS isn't great for Vista adopters.  It isn't going to be based on Vista, so Vista looks like it's going to be the next ME to me.  I might get a new hard drive and work toward an XP upgrade soon.
As much as I prefer Linux, my consulting work says otherwise (it also says that XP is what everyone else is using and wants me to use).

 

[Dan Lyke]

Jay, if you've got the AVR32 IDE working under Vista, I'd love a nudge in the right direction.

I need to get my kit from Atmel (they let us play with 'em, and promised to send 'em, but logistics meant they had to take 'em to the next workshop...), and I've been doing my straight ATmega stuff under Linux or XP (because the folks I deliver to run XP), but a few things about how Atmel had their Eclipse plug-ins working on Windows were intriguing enough to make me want to run there.

I'd also love to get instructions to let others get the straight AVR environment running on Vista, I got it working on my machine, but I forget how, and one of my customers doesn't have a full build environment, they can just program the chips with my binaries. Means they can't do simple timing tweaking when they change the hardware, so I've got to recompile for everything.

(However, for the next month, at least, most of my work will be consumer code on Windows that'll have to deploy to both XP and Vista. Ahhh, the joys of notYET and C#...)

 

[JayStPeter]

Jay, if you've got the AVR32 IDE working under Vista, I'd love a nudge in the right direction.

Nope, sorry.  Just a good old PIC.  But, the ICE plugged right in and worked.

Jay