I think what irks the most is that the end of XP has been known for YEARS! And as usual nothing has been done in regards to updating everything until the very end of XP. Or rather, as in this topic it is very obvious, some won't fix their departments for years...

Yeah, can't argue with that.

In some cases what's in the background is that the government/public don't want to pay for the public sector to upgrade any sooner than necessary, so this kind of thing gets put off till it's absolutely unavoidable. They then run into the usual difficulty in determining how long it will take, specification bloat, supplier negotiations, etc etc, everything takes 3x longer than expected and hey presto, they still haven't moved and xp has run out.

But I daresay there are others who that kind of excuse/explanation doesn't apply to.

I quite like XP, I have several (non-internet facing) computers running it. It allows those computers to do what they need to do and there's no real reason for an upgrade. That said, I think that it would be ludicrous to use it on a computer that processes sensitive information, particularly in light of the inherent, completely unfixable security issues XP has and will have, no matter how long the IRS pays for limited security support. I won't even do my personal banking on my Windows computers that don't run 7.

This is kind of like that story about how the Air Force still uses 8-inch floppies in its anti-missile systems. Initially I thought "Oh that's cool that those things are still getting use, don't fix what's not broken I guess" but then it dawned on me that the disks aren't in someone's personal collection or a museum, they're used in defense systems which we rely on to defend our country from nuclear attacks and they're going to wear out sooner or later.

The USN also still deploys the Browning M2, which was designed a century ago.

I bet nobody at the receiving end of a .50 BMG has never ever made jokes about its venerability.

Jorpho wrote:

... John Oliver did a piece on the US missile silos a while back; they're still using 8-inch floppies.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Y1ya-yF35g

^ Just unscrewed myself watching this 🤣 🤣 🤣 .

I think an American nuke commander with drinking habits too worrysome for THE RUSSIANS 😵 is far more scarier than any floppy. 🤣

Jorpho wrote:

John Oliver did a piece on the US missile silos a while back; they're still using 8-inch floppies.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Y1ya-yF35g

If they've got enough of a floppy disk supply, I say better just leave it that way. These computers are exceptionally reliable and will last you a lifetime with minimum maintenance (that's not saying maintenance itself won't be complicated), and it wouldn't help anybody one bit to leave it to something newer that would still take years to be properly audited, and even then, there's still a risk something will screw up during/after the transition.

This reminds me a bit of that Polish railway station run by an Odra 1305...in 2010.

The crowbar, well, that's a different story...

I always thought XP was a far better design than Vista and newer Windows. XP is still fine online today if you have 2GB of ram and Avast Antivirus. (still supported by Avast until at least 2017) I wish XP was still in support. Just because it is old is no reason to stop Microsoft Support. I use XP over any other OS in todays world since I love it so much. 😀 Been a happy customer since 2004!

computergeek92 wrote:

I always thought XP was a far better design than Vista and newer Windows. XP is still fine online today if you have 2GB of ram and Avast Antivirus. (still supported by Avast until at least 2017) I wish XP was still in support. Just because it is old is no reason to stop Microsoft Support. I'd use XP over any other OS any day.

2001 is antique by software standards.

Thats your opinion, XP is timeless to me. It's easier to use and much faster on new hardware.

I still go online with my backup PC from 2002, (Athlon XP 2400+, 2GB Ram, 120GB hard drive, Geforce4 Ti 4600, WinXP SP3) BTW even 30Gb hard drives are enough for modern day internet if you don't download too often and you migrate your user files to a file server. Just think about how small smartphone SD data cards are.. 😉 I'd say a PC earlier than 1999 is close to antique. (You can try upgrading the 1999 PC's cpu to a 1GHz PIII or equivalent in order to match earlier retail XP machine speeds) Computers evolved much faster in the 90's than they do in the present day.

Dominus wrote:

I think what irks the most is that the end of XP has been known for YEARS! And as usual nothing has been done in regards to updating everything until the very end of XP. Or rather, as in this topic it is very obvious, some won't fix their departments for years...

You have to remember: Microsoft kept extending the Windows XP support deadline, and releasing/announcing new service packs. The original EOL for Windows XP (what was actually released in 2001, and what's actually 13-14 years old) happened in 2005, but Service Pack 1/1a extended into late 2006, Service Pack 2 (which wasn't released until 2004) into 2010, and Service Pack 3 (which was released in 2009) in 2014 (the "final EOL" for XP).

So it's really not fair to slam them for "not upgrading so many years ago" - because so many years ago, there were still Service Packs being released for XP, and Microsoft just kept kicking the support down the line. Once SP3 was declared as the "real beginning of the end," and Microsoft actually stuck to it, then the migration became necessary, and was implemented. It's most likely that this "kicking down the line" happened because of Vista's poor marketplace performance (iirc Vista has never achieved more than like 10-15% marketshare, and there are segments where it never really penetrated (e.g. embedded systems) due to its performance requirements). I think this also created an over-dependance/whatever with XP - it's the only operating system to run past the ten-year mark, and it's also the only one that seems to attract so much emotional response over its EOL announcement.

As far as the confusion over embedded/POS, etc:

- Windows XP Embedded SP3 support ends January 2016
- Windows Embedded Standard 2009 and Embedded POSReady 2009 support ends in 2019 (following the ten-year cycle)

Neither of these are "Windows XP" in terms of what people are using on their personal computers, but are built upon the same foundation as XP offered much lower system requirements than Vista and thus worked better for embedded equipment. These operating systems are primarily designed and validated for things like ATMs, cash registers, vending machines, etc - not running a gaming PC. Some of the updates that were released for XP are common with them, but that isn't an assurance that running Embedded/POSReady updates is a magic bullet to keep using XP for another five years.

We've been through this countless times and will be countless times more. 😀

XP isn't better designed than more modern versions of Windows. It isn't easier to use and isn't faster on newer hardware either. Heck, you'll be hard pressed to get a good deal of the really new hardware to even work properly on XP, in terms of drivers.

Like everything, it does some things objectively better, and others objectively worse, and the rest is just a whole bunch of subjective opinion by people who simply got so comfortable with XP before there were any compelling reasons to upgrade, that they consider everything else inferior, simply because it's not what they are used to.

However, as time goes by, more and more features are being deployed in newer versions of Windows, and more and more software is written to utilize existing features in newer versions of Windows, that XP is becoming more and more objectively inferior, at least to run on a modern/semi-modern PC. Just like 98SE/2000 did before. For legacy systems it can still be tremendously useful, again, just like older versions of Windows can be - which is something VOGONS users know a lot about.

The general rule of thumb I've been using, which seems to work well enough, is to always use the contemporary OS for the hardware in each system I have. At least this way you know it's likely been tested to work somewhat reliably together, and to complement one another's abilities. Thus, I have computers running Windows 98SE, XP, Vista, 7 and 8.1, and all work pretty well for what they are expected to do.

obobskivich wrote:

I think I've seen pictures of that! :lol: […]
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DracoNihil wrote:

I do recall somewhere something as old as MS-DOS 5 is still used for rationing systems.

I think I've seen pictures of that! 🤣

Quick-search and here's an example on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS#/media/F … he_aircraft.jpg (dated 2011, and the caption says it was apparently on the way out)

Can modern hardware even run DOS anymore?

smeezekitty wrote:

I disagree. While the UI changes bothered people, it was less-so a functionality problem but more like a "people don't like chan […]
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When Vista came out, people hated it, not really because of all of the quirkyness, but really because of the counterintuitive design. The design of the OS was given to the programmers, and allowing programmers to design the program is always a big mistake, because programming can be so tedious and boring which leads them to start "challenging" themselves, by way of introducing new features which 99% of people will never use.

I disagree. While the UI changes bothered people, it was less-so a functionality problem but more like a "people don't like change" problem.
The biggest thing that gave Vista a bad reputation was poor performance on period hardware. On the other hand, Windows 8 DOES have a serious usability issue.

I love the start search in Vista/7 but they relied way too heavily on in in 8

What killed Vista was a lack of driver support for a lot of devices that people were still using with XP and the need to have to click a box every 5 seconds whenever you wanted to open a program or a program was doing something in the background that Microsoft thought might be a security risk even if it wasn't. 7 still does it sometimes, but not the extent that Vista did.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfetbidVUYw

Cancel or allow?

Windows XP is probably my favorite Windows OS of all time. It's still completely capable by today's standards and its primary insecurity was due to the fact that it came out when everyone was making the transition from dialup to broadband and as a result routers/NAT wasn't all that common and most people just connected straight to the modem, exposing their boxes to all manner of worms and malware.

These days though Windows XP is EXTREMELY responsive. The 2D desktop performance of Windows XP is actually better than VISTA/7/8.

Thats your opinion, XP is timeless to me. It's easier to use and much faster on new hardware.

As it is yours. I don't find it easier to use than Vista/7 once accustom to the latter.
XP cannot fully use modern hardware so it seems like a waste to use it as the primary OS

What killed Vista was a lack of driver support for a lot of devices that people were still using with XP and the need to have to click a box every 5 seconds whenever you wanted to open a program or a program was doing something in the background that Microsoft thought might be a security risk even if it wasn't.

I agree that MS screwed up badly by dropping so much driver support AND making most XP drivers not work.

sliderider wrote:

Can modern hardware even run DOS anymore?

Yes. As long as Legacy BIOS can run, DOS can run.

One potential issue with running DOS on newer systems is DOS uses a loop instead of halting the CPU while waiting for anything.
That causes newer CPUs to heat up quite a bit.

sliderider wrote:

Can modern hardware even run DOS anymore?

I've booted FreeDOS from UBCD on relatively modern hardware (Core 2 *** era). That picture is from 2011, and who knows if the machine driving that monitor is contemporaneous or itself much older.

sliderider wrote:

What killed Vista was a lack of driver support for a lot of devices that people were still using with XP and the need to have to click a box every 5 seconds whenever you wanted to open a program or a program was doing something in the background that Microsoft thought might be a security risk even if it wasn't. 7 still does it sometimes, but not the extent that Vista did.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfetbidVUYw

Cancel or allow?

UAC is, on the whole, a good thing though - there's no reason why everything should run with full global admin privs all the time. A lot of the "this is broken by Vista" is actually 3rd-party drivers or applications that are poorly/lazily slapped together and don't know what to do with a system that enforces some security policies. A lot of that stuff will also break in 2k/XP if group security policies are enforced more strictly, and in some cases Vista actually handles things more gracefully (because UAC allows temporary elevation, whereas some applications (especially games) will just refuse to work until you completely defeat group security policies and let them have full global admin). UAC prompts aren't generated because "Microsoft thinks its a security" risk either (it's not like an anti-virus working from a definition file) - they're generated when an application wants certain escalated privs; it's very similar to Ubuntu's SUDO, but much more automated (in that Windows detects this escalation at run-time, and prompts, as opposed to the application failing and having to be re-run with escalated privs). Wikipedia has a more detailed list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Account_Co … er_a_UAC_prompt

From having a few Vista machines still kicking around the house, UAC prompts in normal use, especially with newer software, are rare.

smeezekitty wrote:

One potential issue with running DOS on newer systems is DOS uses a loop instead of halting the CPU while waiting for anything.
That causes newer CPUs to heat up quite a bit.

In other words - with DOS running, the CPU is always at 100%? Interesting. Never thought about that.

dr_st wrote:

In other words - with DOS running, the CPU is always at 100%? Interesting. Never thought about that.

To add: DOS won't request lower p-states or other power saving functions, so usually other hardware can heat up quite a bit and/or power consumption can be higher. I've observed this even on P4 and A64 systems, and I imagine things haven't improved since. 🤣

Does FreeDOS try to implement power states at all though? What about DOSIdle for atleast the CPU?