Good bye

[Les Mikesell]

Tony Molloy wrote:

>> Security updates are still being provided to XP so existing users aren't
>> being forced to switch yet as they are continuously in fedora, and
>> there's a chance they will have it mostly fixed by SP2 time.  In any
>> case I can deal with a change once a decade or so. But yes, I will
>> complain if any of my current programs don't continue to run or else
>> have push-button updates to fix them.
>>
> 
> You try to buy a PC from Dell recently with XP installed.

I don't object so much to installing a new system on a new machine 
because I normally keep my old ones running to cover anything that won't 
work immediately.  Once everything is running correctly though, there is 
no excuse for breaking it and it should not be necessary to reinstall an 
operating system for the life of the hardware.

> I presume most of 
> the major manufacturers are the same. It's Vista or bust. Now lets see we had 
> Windows-98 Windows-nt Windows-2000 Windows-XP Windows-Vista  all in the last 
> decade. That's not counting the home versions versus the professional 
> versions. Lots of these had incompatibilities.

You can find exceptions, but just about every third party program would 
run across that set because the commonly used interfaces were 
maintained.  And if you expect a 5-year useful life for hardware, most 
of those lasted that span with security updates once MS recognized the 
need for them.

> A chance ;-) XP-SP2 hasn't fixed XP problems why should Vista-SP2 be expected 
> to fix Vista problems.

What problems do you still see in XP or 2000+?  My updated post-SP2 
windows machines are as stable/reliable as anything running Linux.  My 
laptap sometimes gets into an odd state after many 
standby/wakeup-on-a-different-wireless network operations but I haven't 
been able to make that work at all under Linux for a comparison.  I 
haven't closely tracked the size/number of updates, but I'd guess that 
there is more update churn in even the Centos5.x distro than a pre-vista 
windows.  That's not a completely fair comparison because of the 
additional apps in the Linux distros, but a few years back I would have 
promoted linux as the more stable choice.

-- 
    Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com