By By XP!

[Wetsparks]

It seems that in something like 20 day's time Microsoft will, in their infinite wisdom, be dropping support for all revisions of XP.

Just wondering what, if any, impact this will have. How many people still use XP, I do on my astro laptop and I'm not too sure me laptop will be that happy with 7 or 8 on it.

Open to general thoughts and considerations.

[John]

We still use XP on our laptops and desktops. I've still got W98 on an old lappy that I use for occasional web access. 

I'm not proposing to upgrade until something doesn't work any more. None of our stuff is in any way "business critical" 

[russ]

Not used XP for almost 2 years now. Found Win7 runs without hitch and there was no reason to hang on to XP.

I have a friend at work who still only uses Win98, swears by it. The only real issue to MS pulling support is the lack of security updates and total lack of driver support from third parties. Will make updating hardware almost impossible as there will be no drivers.

[ChrisLX200]

Nothing will stop running just because MS ceases support, but adding new stuff may become a problem. They never did resolve a lot of bugs in XP but if you can live with it as it is now then there's no problem. The only real problem is if you have it connected to your home network where there is ptentially a slight increase in security issues that may impact your other machines, but a 3rd party anti-virus program should take care of that. However you'd be stupid to use an XP machine for critical stuff like home banking (for example).

ChrisH

[oldpink]

I did like XP and used it for years but now I use Windows 7 ultimate on my PC's & laptop with no real issues
I doubt I will ever use win 8 as its very clumsy and meant for tablet users and not for the Tekkie users like myself

[russ]

I did like XP and used it for years but now I use Windows 7 ultimate on my PC's & laptop with no real issues

I doubt I will ever use win 8 as its very clumsy and meant for tablet users and not for the Tekkie users like myself

Win7 is rock solid. I was half expecting it to be flakey at first and an immediate return to XP. But it hit the ground running and i couldn't see a single reason for running XP. 

[ChrisLX200]

Yes Win7 is probably their best offering to date, the release of Win8 would have made me sell any shares I held in MS (had I got any....) :-)

ChrisH

[Xplode]

Unless your computer is really old it should handle win7 without problems. To get it to run faster i suggest to turn of system restore and all visual effects. For more advanced users it's possible to make a slim version of win7 with lots of stuff removed that isn't needed for astro use.

For imaging and guiding i think dual core is the minimum to avoid guideproblems because of waiting time caused by other applications.

[pete_l]

The only difference I expect to see with my XP notebook and the old PCs  that I have migrated onto Virtualbox virtual images, is that I won't have to put up with any more annoying updates fro Microsoft. They always seem to "magically" start themselves running at the most inconvenient times.

I don't expect anything to stop working, catch fire, become corrupted or infested with viruses, malware or trojans. In fact, I doubt that I'll even notice when XP support finally gets pulled.

[AlexB67]

Still got the old laptop that the missus mainly uses, that thing will just not dye, an AMD 1.8 GHz single core with 1Gb RAM , it was a huge amount at the time and she still uses it and works fine, but  I am going to build her a new ( old) desktop machine with an old motherboard and CPU I still have, ( my previous PC ) core 2 Duo 3.16 with 4 Gb of RAM  that will still work very well today for everyday use and the internet. I will not bother with the old windows XP copy on that and go for Linux mint instead, she's happy to use linux, so finally bye bye XP.  you served us well  , I always quite liked it in its day and never bothered with the ever resource hogging Vista that superseded it at the time and jumped to win 7 later on for main use, as well as Linux on my own machine.

[toddstep]

I like XP. I tried 7 for a little while but went back. As long as it runs the software I use I will continue to use it. I still run win2k on my home server. Guess I'm slow to change

[Dave_D]

while i admit that win7 is a good OS, as a long-time *nix developer and  preferer, i'm still longing for the day that various devs see the light and port their stuff to native Linux applications               

my scope control machine is running XP and i have absolutely no need or desire to 'upgrade' 

most, but certainly not all windows (xp and 7) security and performance issues are down to the bad default settings and a bit of reading goes a long way with all microsoft operating systems

[John]

 Guess I'm slow to change

Me too. Plus our fastest machine is slower than the ones being discussed in this thread 

I think I've started a museum of PC's here 

[Dave_D]

I will not bother with the old windows XP copy on that and go for Linux mint instead

I'll buy that man a pint 

[AlexB67]

Me too. Plus our fastest machine is slower than the ones being discussed in this thread 

I think I've started a museum of PC's here 

Perhaps I have something even slower coming to think of it.

If you ever plan to open a museum lemme know, I can bring you a museum piece. I bet it will still switch on and work, it was one of those where you  had to manually park the disk with a DOS command before switching it off I recall. I kept it for sentimental reasons, it was a 286 with 640k Ram running Dos with one of those green colour screens, the refresh/ lag was enormous when you scrolled through a document. It was good enough to write a 200 page thesis though in its day,  using the most basic tools using an ultra fast DOS port of the vi editor using minimal memory typesetting tex/latex, it got the job done

[Alien 13]

I do still like XP some of my favorite games from yesteryear wont run on win 7 so i have ended up with 2 laptops now.

The driver issue works both ways i had a perfectly fine Epson scanner (an expensive one) that isnt supported by win 7 same with a creative webcam.

Alan

[Zakalwe]

XP was first released over a decade ago. It's long overdue retirement. Both Win 7 and 8 are significantly faster, way more stable and offer a host of security features.

My biggest bugbear with XP is that it tended to be installed using FAT16 or 32 rather than the NTFS file structure. This meant that file sizes were limited to 2GB or 4GB. A planetary or Lunar AVI can now easily be larger than 2 gigabyte

[russ]

I do still like XP some of my favorite games from yesteryear wont run on win 7 so i have ended up with 2 laptops now.

The driver issue works both ways i had a perfectly fine Epson scanner (an expensive one) that isnt supported by win 7 same with a creative webcam.

Alan

I know that feeling. I have games the kids love (mainly older Star Wars ones) that won't run on Win7 and also tossed a Canon printer in the loft due to lack of Win7 support. We do have a Dell desktop in the loft that still works and runs XP but can't be bothered anymore. I just keep that bit quiet from the kids.

[John]

...... it was a 286 with 640k Ram running Dos with one of those green colour screens......

286 with 640K of RAM ? ...... we used to dream of a 286 with 640K of RAM (said in Yorkshire accent ).

Best we could manage was a ZX81 with a wobbly RAM pack and a cassette player. But we were happy in them days ..... 

[AlexB67]

Now you are just showing your age . I recall those too ( in school ) , I was still wet behind the ears back in those days :0),  but I never really used computers until  the BBC micros in earnest. When I was in school I was not one of the computer types at all. Some of my school mates used to go home to play on their ZX spectrum or whatever it was, I used to go and ride bikes and inflict some injuries on myself

[AstroGnome]

Still got the old laptop that the missus mainly uses, that thing will just not dye, an AMD 1.8 GHz single core with 1Gb RAM , it was a huge amount at the time and she still uses it and works fine, but  I am going to build her a new ( old) desktop machine with an old motherboard and CPU I still have, ( my previous PC ) core 2 Duo 3.16 with 4 Gb of RAM  that will still work very well today for everyday use and the internet. I will not bother with the old windows XP copy on that and go for Linux mint instead, she's happy to use linux, so finally bye bye XP.  you served us well  , I always quite liked it in its day and never bothered with the ever resource hogging Vista that superseded it at the time and jumped to win 7 later on for main use, as well as Linux on my own machine.

Erm.... I still have a 386 Toshiba laptop with Windows 3.11 on it and 4meg ram (yes, you read that right, 4 'Meg'). Plus a Pentium 4 machine with 1.5Gig. Both still crack along nicely for what I use them for. The Laptop runs Office (only version 6 (I think) but still produces .doc files) and the desktop happily runs XP and most astro software (plus linux of course). Then again I'm too tight to buy new stuff if I can make do

[russ]

Erm.... I still have a 386 Toshiba laptop with Windows 3.11 on it and 4meg ram (yes, you read that right, 4 'Meg'). Plus a Pentium 4 machine with 1.5Gig. Both still crack along nicely for what I use them for. The Laptop runs Office (only version 6 (I think) but still produces .doc files) and the desktop happily runs XP and most astro software (plus linux of course). Then again I'm too tight to buy new stuff if I can make do

I fondly remember my Dell 386 desktop. I remember going to have video memory increased from 256K to 512K so i could play Wolfenstein. Could me £80. And loved Windows 3.11. Replaced it with my first home built machine running a Cyrix 200mhz cpu, 64mb ram and a newly released 1Gb HDD. Oh and a ATI Rage graphics card with a Voodoo 4mb gaming add on card. And then stepped back in amazement at the glorious sight of Quake. Great times  I've mainly forgotten all the pain of trying to get anything to work with Windows 95. 

[Naemeth]

One of our old computers had a hard drive that was less than 1 MB. You could back up the whole hard-drive on a 3.5" floppy disk!

[Wetsparks]

Hay this is bringing back the memories. I started my 'computer life' on a Commodore PET hosting a 6502 processor. Learn't to program in Basic and Machine code on it, all saved to tape. I had a massive 16K of memory, I upgraded it to 32k and then brought a 5.25 floppy disk drive at a cost of nearly 500 quid and that was back in 1982!!!

[Wetsparks]

Ahaa, to use an old phrase 'I think I've found the 'N' in the wood pile, you have to be of a certain age to know that saying!

With Microsoft no longer supporting XP there will, in the future, be no upgrade to .NET framework (4). So if in the future some supplier software comes out that requires a possible (5) version, XP users may be stuffed