Microsoft finalizes the “This Should Get You to Windows 7″ Service Pack for XP
It’s been four long years since the last one, but Service Pack 3 for Windows XP has finally been released to manufacturing, soon to arrive on the machines of consumers and enterprises alike who are counting on the update to help them avoid migrating to Vista for as long as possible. It’s not that there’s much new in the package, but it does give the older OS one last tune-up before it passes into the void, and benefits the many enterprises who’d like to nurse their XP installations well into the future.
After that? Well, for what it’s worth, Jason Hiner, executive editor of Tech Republic, is predicting that Microsoft will grudgingly accept that the resistance to Vista is not going to go away and so will move up the release of Windows 7 to late 2009 and overhaul its OS development approach in the process. Stranger things have happened, but not many.
Why are we assuming that Windows 7 will be any better/more desirable than than Vista? Or even XP?
I tried Vista and hated it! I am staying with XP, and if the time comes that XP can’t be maintained any more, I will switch to Linux!
If MS weren’t so xenophobic, they would do well to switch to a flavor of unix as their foundational OS. They would be following once again in the footsteps of Apple, but that would free them to leverage their real strengths, namely developer, system administration and business productivity tools.
Very few MS users really know or care what underlies Office, Visual Studio, Sql Server, et.al. If MS could deliver those kinds of products cheaper, faster, safer, more reliable, and run on minimal hardware, and in the process make more money, we would all be better off.
I agree with rlambkin. Switching to a Unix would help Microsoft disentangle itself from low-level plumbing and focus higher up the stack, where it generally seems to do a better job. (Can I mix a metaphor, or what?)
Microsoft is the reason super-powerful computers are slower than my 1980’s vintage CPM computer.
Okay…I know it’s not a fair comparison, but with all the horsepower under the hood, you’ve got to wonder why a PC is so slow.
I need to clarify a few things here.
I’ve programmed on many OS’s over the years, and while I love the corporate versions of UNIX (HPUX, AIX), come on now, Linux is not the cat’s meow. While UNIX in general handles threading and processes better than Windows does, it has significant limitations that will continue to prevent it from displacing Windows. Vista and XP will continue to have much better driver support and support far more end-user software. I don’t like bloatware or inefficiency more than anyone else, but right now hardware is cheap and readily available, so what’s the big deal? MS does a decent job at backward compatibility and support of old OS’s.
Many of us had the same complaints moving to the eye candy of of XP from Win2k, so rhetorically why aren’t you wanting to go back to that OS? Be fair now, it’s all a matter of degree as it relates to the conservatism of OS upgrades. You guys have a poor sense of history.
And only a newbie will ask a question like “I wonder why a PC is so slow”. Please, don’t act like you’re so intellient, anyone who knows what they’re doing should have the right answers to this question.
Mr. Anderson: Do you know what circular reasoning is?
If Microsoft dropped Windows and adopted some version of Unix as its OS, unless it lost a huge amount of its market share, then that version of Unix would most definitely have driver support for just as wide a variety of hardware as Windows does now. The reason Windows has such good driver support is that device manufacturers write drivers for the dominate OS. If that dominate OS is Unix, then they will supply device drivers for Unix.