quote:

Fans of the six-year-old operating system set to be pulled off store shelves in June have papered the Internet with blog posts, cartoons and petitions recently. They trumpet its superiority to Windows Vista, Microsoft's latest PC operating system, whose consumer launch last January was greeted with lukewarm reviews.

No matter how hard Microsoft works to persuade people to embrace Vista, some just can't be wowed. They complain about Vista's hefty hardware requirements, its less-than-peppy performance, occasional incompatibility with other programs and devices and frequent, irritating security pop-up windows.

For them, the impending disappearance of XP computers from retailers, and the phased withdrawal of technical support in coming years, is causing a minor panic.

Take, for instance, Galen Gruman. A longtime technology journalist, Gruman is more accustomed to writing about trends than starting them.

But after talking to Windows users for months, he realized his distaste for Vista and strong attachment to XP were widespread.
Don't Miss

* InfoWorld: Save XP petition
* Microsoft: Support timeline

"It sort of hit us that, wait a minute, XP will be gone as of June 30. What are we going to do?" he said. "If no one does something, it's going to be gone."

So Gruman started a Save XP Web petition, gathering since January more than 100,000 signatures and thousands of comments, mostly from die-hard XP users who want Microsoft to keep selling it until the next version of Windows is released, currently targeted for 2010.

quote:

Originally posted by Boris:
Just because they're taking XP off the shelves doesn't mean they have stopped supporting the OS.

Expect support to continue for at least 3-5 more years for XP.

FYI, MSFT no longer supports Win98 & Win 2000 (no more patches for the OS)

quote:

Al Gillen, an IDC analyst, estimated that at the end of 2008 nearly 60 percent of consumer PCs and almost 70 percent of business PCs worldwide will still run XP. Microsoft plans to end full support -- including warranty claims and free help with problems -- in April 2009. The company will continue providing a more limited level of service until April 2014.

quote:

Originally posted by pacfan:
XP is a better OS, but you can't stand in the way of progress. Crap or not, Vista is the future, for now, at least until Microsoft's next brain(fart)storm.

quote:

Originally posted by BackThePack:

quote:

Originally posted by pacfan:
XP is a better OS, but you can't stand in the way of progress. Crap or not, Vista is the future, for now, at least until Microsoft's next brain(fart)storm.

Yeah they also said the same thing when they came out with Windows ME,and we all know how that turned out.


Smedley and Boris I guess we have a little different defintion of support here. I should clarified that a little better. Yes I understand they are not coming out with anything new on them but at least you can still download the service packs for them.


I am getting ready to build a new machine here soon. A few weeks back I called both Dell and Gateway to get a price of what I wanted and what they would charge me. Both of them would have actually charge me more money for having them install Xp pro on a machine instead of Vista.