Use of Microsoft Windows XP has grown inside corporations, but a new study shows that nearly half of business PCs are still running the older Windows 2000.
The slow road to Windows XP
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Funny how inertia can be your friend and a pain in the butt at the same time.
for me personally and at my work as well, there just hasn’t been a compelling reason to move to XP. the only PCs actually running XP are the ones that came with it pre-installed.
Why change when you don’t need to?
Aren’t both Win2k and XP fundamentally the same?
Are businesses waiting for Longhorn?
99% of secreatries just run Word, Powerpoint, and Outlook. Oh, and they keep EBay up on IE. Why would they need XP? Well, IMHO, Xp IS a big improvement over even 2000. With XP, an uptime of several days is often achieveable. Guess what? this matters little to CEO’s and secretaries and other low-end users.
Not only does MSFT face a problem here, but contenders like AAPL and RHAT. The enterprise market may be BIG, but it’s BAD, as well. AAPL and LINUX thrive in markets where you need more than an ability to type business letters and read E-mail. Thus; graphic design, 3D, publishing, audio, video, education, etc.
Are businesses waiting for Longhorn?
Nope. They are busy making money doing business.
There are not very many compelling reasons for any company to upgrade to XP or Longhorn for that matter. As long as you can get the work done and do it relatively effectively why upgrade?
Product activation
Corporate Edition
Product activation
Agreed. That (for XP), coupled with the ‘restore CDs’ (for nearly all bundled versions of Windows) are the biggest PITA. Makes life un-necessarily complex.
Good thing that I can avoid Windows much of the time and can use fairly unencumbered Linux distributions instead.
Corporate Edition
If legal, usually requires you to buy Windows twice; once with the machine, and a second time for the corporte licence.
If not legal, it’s not an option for folks with ethics — and then there’s the practical problem of Microsoft abandoning corporate serial numbers to stop software licence violations…leading to hassles for both violators and honest people.
If the computer came with 2000 on it, and its working well, chances are they aren’t going to purchase XP for it. Most businesses and users only upgrade their OS when they upgrade their PC.
Mac users are different though. They WILL purchase the new OS. Maybe its because they see value in it as opposed to Windows users.
I work with a shade over 10,000 clients, and thus support a wide variety of OSes.
The vast majority are win2k, oftentimes upgrades from older Win98 (esp. if the boxes were powerful enough to begin with to run Win2k easily), XP was only on new (Dell) computers, a smattering of Win98, 2 WinME (ugh!), 1 RHat box and a BeOS box(!)
I have found that win2k runs better on older hardware, such as that found around the time WinME came out, unlike putting XP on said same box.
Most of my clients are business people, and as such, don’t really care what OS they run, so long as it *does* run.
Upgrades to a newer OS occur when the old PC dies for good.
and XP is 5.1
as the name impiles, there is no more improvement (in daily use, IMO)
XP just eat more RAM and CPU than 2000
Most of our machines are Windows2000 while newer ones came with Windows XP licenses, so out of about 30 machines I’d say maybe five or six are XP. Strictly speaking, when 2k is working pretty well we just don’t feel like spending the money to upgrade.
I think small businesses and non profit orgs should forego XP and Longhorn and just spend the cash on Linux.Bite the bullet now and adjust to a new paradigm.
Its just not profitable for some people to upgrade hardware and software so quickly.Especially if the current solution like 2k rocks already.
As a former Mac user there were always nice little features we always thought “how did we ever live without that etc”. Also Apple had a long history of breaking x% of working apps so there wasn’t much choice but to stay on top and I hear OSX revisions still do this.
As for W2K I will never downgrade to something monstrously bigger more resource intensive, while some core components may have improved, there are too many things I don’t want. Besides if it ain’t too broke why change. If XP had managed to break more apps and fix user perceived problems, perhaps.. but instead MS adds things I have no clue about.
There is a cetain sence of pride in refusing to follow orders that don’t make much sense. Also the industry is getting pretty old now and is perhaps fatigued.
Forgot to add.Where I work,non-profit education, there are no XP clients.Strictly 2k , NT , 98 and 95.The oldest machines are some pentiums about 166mhz with about 80mb ram.
Apple OS X has gotten faster on the same hardware with each revision.
Windows get’s slower with each revision on the same hardware.
Both have had some problems with backwards compatiblity.
My work still runs win95, and win 98SE beause we need netware support. The machines run behind a firewall and rarely connect to the net so the danger is minial, but since the Server is Netware 3.12 we need better DOS netware support.
As for any who would ask why don’t you upgrade I say why? That server has had two problems in the past 5 years. the Hard drive died, and the power supply blew out. WE have replaced both and the machine runs 24 days 365 days a year with no other failures. Try that with XP
We have 4 computers on XP, all upgraded when replacing an old computer in the past month, while the other 6 are still on 2000. The 2000 computers are too old to upgrade, so we only need to go to XP when we get a new computer, which wont happen for at least another 3 to 6 months.
Overall, I consider moving from Windows 2000 to XP a downgrade.
Sadly, the only fully supported, desktop Windows operating system for the next 12 months is Windows XP.
peragrin
WE have replaced both and the machine runs 24 days 365 days a year with no other failures. Try that with XP
WOW that machine must be really out of date. (what about service patches?)
it costs too mutch to upgrade to windows xp than to use windows 2000 (new licensing rules from microsoft made it more expensive than before) that’s why corparations are not upgrading
There really isn’t any need for any business to upgrade from XP to Longhorn. When administered correctly, XP is a very good OS, and runs very smoothly. In my place of business, about 95% of the machines run XP, and the others are either either 98SE or 95. I have a 2003 server as well as as MDK box running as a proxy/webfilter inside of the corporate firewall. When Longhorn comes out, we have absolutely no reason to upgrade any of the PC’s here. I imagine once we replace the older boxes (95 and 98SE) we’ll end up getting Longhorn simply because it’ll come preinstalled. There will simply not be the big “push” for businesses to upgrade to Longhorn like we saw once 2000 and XP hit the scene years ago.
It’s like the others have said, there is no need to upgrade when what you have works fine. Our company is running win2000, there are only 2 features that would make me want to upgrade to XP. They are remote desktop and fast user switching.
The sad fact seems to be that it’s only going to get easier to infect a w2k box, because there’s not going to be any more security updates for it.
The best tech support for w2k boxes will be SpyBotS&D, AdAware and ClamWin. Those three products will hopefully keep up with the malware, even if the OS doesn’t ever get any updates.
It seems to me only a matter of time before those w2k boxes become zombies. There’s going to be an increasing market for w2k security products & services as people try and cling to their aging w2k instances.
Magus,
I work in a non-profit too. We have mostly Windows 95 but also 98, ME, NT 4, 2000, XP and Linux systems.
Next month we plan to replace most Windows system with a Linux terminal server ( http://www.ltsp.org ). It will be about $100 per seat.
By the way, I am using Linux and Windows 2000 to write this message.
The sad fact seems to be that it’s only going to get easier to infect a w2k box, because there’s not going to be any more security updates for it.
this is NOT true…well, at least not for another 5 years. the june 30 freeze is for NEW FEATURES, not security updates. from what i have read, security updates will be provided until 2k11. at that time, win2k will truely become a liability to run.
I have to work with WinXP at work and it’s just a pain in the ass. Every employee should have a base right to use a decent OS.
If I just see all those annoying balloon tips I freak out.
Price and Activation.
Too much to upgrade, too much to buy full copies.
And far too much to by a corporate edition just to avoid Product Activation.
Especially in Education without a lot of money, the two just don’t happen.
Plus there is way too much configuration to set XP back to as much classic mode for multiple users.
Until they drop their prices, and offer more configurable options for Administrators, people will continue to stick with Windows 2000, and won’t Upgrade to XP, or definitely Longhorn.
Nobody seems to bei interested in Cleartype. This is the best improvement for people who read lot of text on the screen. If you have an TFT please upgrade to XP just for ClearType. Can’t live without it anymore!
Upgrading can be a real pain, I’ve tried the Windows XP upgrade on a Windows 98 box and it was worthless, the system wouldn’t work properly and before the end of the day I had to reinstall from scratch anyway.
Upgrade processes are quite painful for people running Windows, programs store settings in all sorts of different places including the regestry and at least 4 or 5 different folders, not all used by one program mind you but its still a pain. Since upgrading from an older version of Windows to a newer one without doing a clean installation is just riddled with flaws, the only option is to back up everything you can find that you want to keep and then restore it after. I haven’t seen software that does this, at least not properly, so I have to do it all myself and then guess where some of the files should go in Windows XP since the folder structure changed a little since Windows 98.
Some of the best experiences I’ve had administering computers was when I was working with a “dead” or obscure operating system like FreeDOS or BeOS because when I used them I didn’t have to upgrade at all for a long time. Linux is fairly easy to upgrade though, for me all I have to do is back up the home folders, do a clean installation and then restore the home folders, no one looses any of their files if they kept them where they should.
I doubt I’m the only one who’s had problems upgrading Windows, but I also expect some people will want to reply saying it went fine for them though, and some people really are that fortunate.
Anyone care to enlighten me as to what its like upgrading from one version of Mac OS X to the next? I’ve always been curious about that OS, even though I won’t have a Mac for quite some time.
With a redundant power supply and RAID hard drives, one could keep a computer running for a year with almost any operating system. Without a redundant power supply and RAID hard drives, I fail to see how you replaced your failed hardware no matter what OS you were running. The OS has nothing to do with hardware redundancy.
There is a lot more to the activation business. A well run IT department will do things like image an install of an OS template and then burn it across the network. They don’t want to do anything stupid like install software — that can take well over a day, considering you have to install windows, ALL the software, get the configuration and security setup and then transport the machines. This also means one requires controlled udpates, patches shouldn’t break other things and they often do. In this environment you can’t blindly update things because that might break the template.
Windows offers a lot of problems in this regard. NT actually behaved really well and even 2k was pretty good. XP is down right broken.
And no, network installs don’t work, again, you don’t have strict controlls. If you want high uptimes and no unnecessary crashes, you have to go as far as to control dlls, especially when you’re in an environment where there is a lot of software installing stuff everywhere.
It’s stable and lighter on resources than XP, so why wouldn’t anyone change if 2k does what they want?
I still use 2k at home and see no reason to “upgrade” at the moment.
On the subject of old hardware… if you have atleast 128mb of ram, xp will run fine even on a p75.. If you have 64mb, then with a lot of tweaking itll run fine if your cpu is 180+ mhz. I know, I have a couple of old systems I piddle with.. XP from cold boot uses only 33mb of ram. 180mhz p1mmx (166 overclocked) with 64mb of ram runs xp great. heh.
By TaterSalad (IP: —.net) – Posted on 2005-06-14 21:08:12
Our company is running win2000, there are only 2 features that would make me want to upgrade to XP. They are remote desktop and fast user switching.
Unfortunately, if you use a Domain Controller on your network Fast User Switching is disabled.
Use Ultr@VNC (or other VNC) for “Remote Desktop” in 2k.
that 33mb is everything, explorer, what few services need to run etc. the kernel it self uses about 5mb.
XP will run slow with default settings, but with a little bit of tweaking it can be made to run as fast and as stable of XP.
Apparently most people dont know how/can’t be bothered to tweak.. so instead they just whine ;P
What are they going to tell to all these guys ? What about the upgrade ? upgrading to XP was not always a walk in the park so just imagine form 2000 to longhorn.
And there are all these unsupported legacy apps that are lying around and that will never be rebuilt for longhorn…
Good luck with the consoles Microsoft.
I am forced to use windows XP at work. I run Autocad and do a lot of 3-D modeling. If I have to reboot less than three times a day I am doing good. I use a 3.2 gig Pentium with 2gigs of ddr ram and a top of the line Nvidia worksation graphic card.
I use Slackware Linux at home with Win4Lin and Windows 98se running Autocad and I go all day without a reboot or a lockup. This is on an Athlon 2000 with Igig of sdr ram and an ati FireGL-t2 graphics card, and it runs just as fast as my at-work machine.
I think that someone must have redefined just what the word “upgrade” means. If it means that I have to spend a shitload of money for a faster computer and more ram and XP for the same performance with less stability, I think I’ll pass on “upgrading”.
If they have 2000, there’s no reason to go to XP and spend the extra obnoxious time tweaking it properly. Many things that you probably disabled can’t be taken out in a corporate environment anyways, the more advanced networking and whatnot included.
But 128 or 64 megs? I’ve gone and disabled services galore, but the OS still hates running on anything less than 256, or at least less than 128. Share your wisdom (/ delusions?
, please.
Try running more than on application on a computer with xp that has only 128m of ram. Just becouse a system boots dosent meen you can get real work done on it. Also not everyone can turn off services on a locked down system. Win2000 is a lot better on older computers.
Dudesdad get your XP machine fixed and stop complaining about it.
My XP machine in work gets rebooted about once every 2 weeks (currently my uptime has been 144 hours). I’ve got Notes, 3 Dameware remote control sessions, Rightfax faxutil, UltraEdit, 4 Terminal Services sessions, Opera, Calc, AD Users and Computers, Excel, snagit & Xmpeg open. Which is typical for me. My machine is a P4 2Ghz with 512Mb RAM.
So if you’ve got two users running the same OS and one users machine crashes 3 times a day and the others runs reliably why blame the OS.
Back on topic. Most of the PCs in our org are NT4. It’s our old SOE. The reason that we’re taking so long to move is because we have hundreds of apps that need to be tested and approved before we give the business XP. We’re doing it slowly but surely. I think that’s the main hurdle for linux. We will never be able to move to linux because of our apps. Our XP migration is planned for 2 years (we have about 80000 PCs worldwide) and lots of our apps are propietary. If it takes 2 years to move to similar, reasonably compatible OS, how long would it take to go to linux.
I am the only user on my work machine. It is maintained by a “Microsoft Certified Engineer”. As a matter of fact I sit in the same room as he does. He has to reboot about twice a day.
It could be that Autocad 2002 doesn’t work well with XP.
I have used Autocad 2002 on Windows 2000 with great success, but not with XP.
At the last Cad shop I worked at I got to chose my OS. I chose 2000, the other five guys went with XP. I got my work done with rarely a problem, the others didn’t fare so well.
BTW; Why are you planning to go with XP in TWO YEARS. Won’t Longhorn be out by then?
1. Key business application (in our case, SAP, Groupwise, Word, Excel, etc.) REQUIRES it.
Or,
2. Can’t maintain security (End of life, slow updates, etc.).
—
Steve
It’s mainly Product Activation and Price.
First of all, Windows costs a lot of money. Look at this comparison:
OS Full Upgrade
Windows XP Pro (1 License) $299.99 $149.99
Windows XP Home (1 License) $199.99 $99.99
Mac OS X Tiger (1 License) $129.99 N/A
Mac OS X Tiger Family Pack (4 Licenses)$199.99 N/A
For the price of FOUR Mac OS X Tiger licenses, you get only ONE Windows XP Home license.
Next is product activation. It’s such a hassle. No one wants to deal with it.
And to address some comments here, there should be no reason for tweaking. The OS should not require tweaking to operate faster.
Just like Mac OSX Tiger. No tweaking required.
[PowerMac]
No corporation should ever upgrade their users’ operating systems until the first service pack, maintenance release, etc. has been distributed.
Having said that, I have used XP at work since service pack 1 and had no problems with it until my company pushed down service pack 2. Then my workstation had to be reimaged. Since then, it works fine.
It was clean cut and simple. It had all the options the administrator needed but still had that windows feel.
Corporate policy requires users to shutdown at the end of day so that on restart next morning the Windows back-office can upload the latest patch, anti-viral, anti-spy, anti-whatnot. Uptime is not a consideration.
probably the best IMO
explorer that used a handful of ram instead of greedy two handed fistfuls…
2k anyday
but XP with everything and I mean EVERYTHING turned off is alright too….
I am the only user on my work machine. It is maintained by a “Microsoft Certified Engineer”. As a matter of fact I sit in the same room as he does. He has to reboot about twice a day.
Ehhh … heh. That may be another problem all together. Try finding a MCDST or someone with at least A+ certification. Not knockin the MCSE’s out there, but I know of a few that I wouldn’t trust with a can of air let alone supporting a workstation. YMMV of course …
1) Upgrades are long and time consuming for large business.
2) Clean installs are typically prefered; because upgrades leave lots of cruft behind. Not to mention going from 9.x to NT base isn’t compatible if your want the NTFS security attributies.
3) Network installs aren’t all that great.
4) Testing and migrating apps costs tons of money. It would be economically not thesiable to upgrade from 2k to xp and then longhorn. It makes sense to wait til the first SP1 for LH is out before any upgrade
As for feature freeze in w2k, MS announce in 2002 (maybe early 03) that no new features would make it in w2k line up. That was because XP is their new baby (which is hogwash).
XP is a bloated w2k and yes, it can be stripped of services but who is going to want to tweak 20,000 desktop systems due to a hardware budget. Yes, it can be scripted but there is also a bunch of costs associate that will go on with that option. No to mention, you always going to hit some ugly snags with scripting certain aspects of tweaking systems for low memory. It makes more sense for companies to wait and gather some cash for an upgrade to both hardware and software.
The fact remains that there will always be legacy OS’ in a network (not every network). Relasitcally, buget cuts and lack of resources are a great inhibitor to upgrades.
On a realistic side, not all the drivers are stable in XP. Keep in mind that NT and 2000 are damn close. However, there was enough infrastructure changes done in XP to the driver sub-system that new drivers needed to be created. 2000 has more stability due to the maturity of its driver base. I would hazard to guess that XP started catching up in driver stability in 2002 / 2003.
PS: Users find serveral interesting places to put their documents. Locating and backing up the data is a huge pain in the arse.
I’ve used both OS’s and in my professional and personal opinion, 2000 is far better than XP when it comes righ down to it. I’ve tested several hardware and software installations, upgrades, downgrades, benchmark tests, loading and unloading , and 2000 has never had any problems adapting to changes, whereas XP has difficulty. I have two identical machines with the same software loaded, one 2000, the other XP, under full load the uptime on the XP is 4 days 12 hours 21 minutes. Uptime on the 2000 is 14 days 2 hours 38 minutes.
It’s just a matter of time.
The constant costly upgrading, migrating, patching, rebooting, …, costs corporations, businesses at all levels, cash-strapped governments, schools from hundreds to billions of dollars (or whatever the local currency) in down and maintenance time is taking its toll.
Open source advocates like myself can rest assured that the old “command-and-control” model is dying a very slow and protracted death.
The “free” market place, and not the closed “proprietary” one, will prevail and make sure the “Houses that Bill and Steve built” will collapse in the long run.
On a realistic side, not all the drivers are stable in XP. Keep in mind that NT and 2000 are damn close. However, there was enough infrastructure changes done in XP to the driver sub-system that new drivers needed to be created. 2000 has more stability due to the maturity of its driver base. I would hazard to guess that XP started catching up in driver stability in 2002 / 2003.
Your mighty intellect might be put to better use on other subjects.
To argue that the changes in driver model between 2000 and XP are greater than those between NT and 2000 is complete ignorance.
The driver model in 2000 was nearly entirely new to accommodate the change to PNP compatible drivers (and had more in common with Windows 98 drivers than Windows NT drivers).
There were some changes between 2000 and XP, but minor in comparison. XP can for the most part use 2000 drivers.
“Your mighty intellect might be put to better use on other subjects. ”
Just as mighty. Please provide your proof. Your own statement:
“(and had more in common with Windows 98 drivers than Windows NT drivers). ”
If so similar, then why cannot people use 98 drivers in XP? I believe that your own expertise is better suited towards other pursuits as well.
I also noted that your sole complaint is on the driver issue, no other points are you discrediting. Perhaps there is more truth in the above paragraph than you care to admit. Or doesn’t your expertise go that far?
Instead of attacking how about providing proof of your wisdom. Attacking is easy, discussing is a civilized manner the hard part. Case in point, this post and yours are perfect examples.
Ejoy your cave.
I am the only user on my work machine. It is maintained by a “Microsoft Certified Engineer”. As a matter of fact I sit in the same room as he does. He has to reboot about twice a day.
It could be that Autocad 2002 doesn’t work well with XP.
I have used Autocad 2002 on Windows 2000 with great success, but not with XP.
At the last Cad shop I worked at I got to chose my OS. I chose 2000, the other five guys went with XP. I got my work done with rarely a problem, the others didn’t fare so well.
BTW; Why are you planning to go with XP in TWO YEARS. Won’t Longhorn be out by then?
Either you are:
1) lying
2) greatly exagerating
or 3) combination of both
Two things strike me as funny here.
First is the fact that you have a MCSE tech who you claim has to reboot his OWN XP machine at least twice a day. AND sits in the same room with another person, who’s box HE setup, that needs to be rebooted several times a day. If that were MY business he would be let go the minute I found that out! NO MS certified person OR highly knowledgable MS user should EVER have this happen and then accept it as a way of life. That is a JOKE! I have setup and built roughly 300+ XP machines by now since XP has come out and the ONE and only time my setups have had reboot issues was from a bad memory module. This is NO exageration. I have clients who’s XP machines stay on for weeks at a time and handle remote connections without a hiccup. So STOP spreading FUD against MS because your “MCSE” tech and you are incompetent. Goto the company owners and DEMAND better computer support people!
Second, Autocad works fine with XP. I am PERSONALLY responsible for 70 PC’s running XP Pro (now SP2) and Autocad 2002 for over a year (upgraded to Autocad 2004 then 2005 just recently) and NEVER had issues with ANY of them (expect for their retarded licensing). These machines are VERY heavy duty and do everything from movie rendering, drawing, 3DMax, to Autocad and only get rebooted once per night for cleanup reasons only since they are touched by over 700 students a day. ALL applications and the OS itself (XP Pro) have been literally flawless in its stability. Granted I am very particular in using name brand Q/A tested brands that have been proven over time (HP, Dell, Gateway, IBM) so the better hardware might be a large factor. But that is part of being a good computer tech.
These sort of comments by you and others like it really gets me upset as I KNOW they must be lies by MS Haters, or just plain incompetence in the administration of MS products. Unfortunately the tech boom from a few years back flooded the market with people who have the credentials but many times those mean nothing in real world. I could write a book on my experiences in the tech industry and some of the stuff I have seen.
Anyway, I wish I could get my hands on your company PC’s. There is a whole better computing experience out there if somehow your posts are factual. But I somehow doubt they are when you can claim Autocad works better in Linux emulation of 98SE than on a modern MS OS itself. LOL!
i dont think he ssaid XP could use 98 drivers he said “had more in common with Windows 98 drivers than Windows NT drivers” as in, the driver model was more related to 98 than NT.
And most of the time XP can use a 2k driver. I use 2k on my dell inspiron because performance seems to be better with 2k and that is using the exact same drivers that are for XP!
It is so nice to hear from you. (are really Howard Dean?)
Everything I have said is true.
Yep, it would be nice to go to the Company Owners and “demand” better equipment and sevices. I would be replaced with someone who could “work within the system”. The company owners think that a twice a day reboot is an absolute non issue. They have been indoctrinated and trained to accept it as normal. Whatever this tech says is gospel to these people. It is very frustrating to work this way, but I will be told to use the tools provided.
Now, how am I being incompetent when my home machine works perfectly? Or am I still lying? I neglected to mention that My wife’s computer is using Windows 2000 and it is solid as a rock. It gets rebooted whenever there is a power failure as she leaves it on continuously. At least I never hear any complaints about it, and believe me I would hear if there was a problem. I use, and pay for, Microsoft products. I build my own equipment and do all of my own software installations.
I didn’t say that Autocad worked better on Linux emulation of 98SE than Microsoft 2000 on my home machine, I said it worked better than Windows XP on my “at-work” machine. My home computers are taken care of by me, and if there is a problem they get fixed. Did I mention that as I am writing this I am looking at five machines here in my home office? I like to tinker.
By far my best experience with Autocad has been with Windows 2000. I merely asked the question about Autocad and XP because everywhere I have worked that has used XP and Autocad, it has been less than desireable.
I would love to have someone, such as yourself, get there hands on these machines and fix them. I am not allowed to change hardware or install software or change anything on the computers at work. (We have a trained professional for that, or so I am told.)
I gave you my experience in the work places I have had to endure. They are true. Are you still ‘Laughing out Loud”? It is no laughing matter, it is a shame.
I would as a consumer never buy Windows XP.
Why – because I am a “Microsoft Hater”, or that I am “incompetent”?
No, i am neither of those things. I, as a consumer, have never had a good experience with the product. So why would I shell out my hard earned jack for something that has been a headache to me every time I have encountered it? I don’t want to drink the Kool-Aid.
True experience is not FUD. It is what it is.
Personally, I have upgraded. My favorite machine at home is my 2gig athlon with 1gig of ram. I have a custom compiled the Kernel and modules to Athlon machine type and patched in Win4Lin support. It works flawlessly. It is fast. I am happy.(did I mention that I like to “tinker”)
That sir…….. is not FUD.
Micko
My XP machine in work gets rebooted about once every 2 weeks (currently my uptime has been 144 hours)
144 hours uptime
from my my suse box
uptime
5:39am up 108 days 22:45, 3 users, load average: 1.26
Windows will never be able to stay up this long
I love XP ( over other windows versions )
but would never use it for mission critical items
My windows 2k tower had an uptime of 49days about a month ago. Would doing fine until I decided ot plug in my usb cf card reader. I forgot it doesnt like my system for whatever reason.. instant reboot!
anyways, windows can and does stay up for that long.
“But I somehow doubt they are when you can claim Autocad works better in Linux emulation of 98SE than on a modern MS OS itself. LOL!”
Actually, I have several games (I know we’re not talking games, but this is an example on performance issues).
No matter how much tweaking and how many magical tricks I pull, several of my newer games still run better in 2k or with WINE in linux, than they do on my XP Pro. Tried several different drivers for board, graphics card and various other hardware bits. Switched off unneeded services, and sure enough, my box is very stable, and it’s been running for ages, but still performance for several apps/games isn’t all that good. directx is upgraded, and windows is fully patched.
I’ve got a gig of RAM and a 3000+ cpu and a gf5950 ultra, so I doubt it’s a hardware bottleneck.
is an open source project meant to be compatible with windows nt.
i wish china india EU south america and billionaires would fund this project so the world could use an OS compatible with windows and drivers for free
Here in Japan I rarely see any business run anything newer than Windows 98. I really am looking forward to the day when the majority will have upgraded to WIn XP.
They’ll get eaten alive by the viruses… burn baby burn.
In my experience:
* Windows NT -> crashed for no reason, several times per day.
* Windows 2000 -> crashes when the mouse is clicked the wrong way, or at the wrong time.
* Windows XP -> much larger uptimes (>30 days), but sooner or later buttons start disappearing (like Windows 2000) and it becomes unresponsive, and has to be rebooted.
* Windows Server 2003 -> same as Windows XP, but less liable to crash when you only use Terminal Server (unless Terminal Server crashes, which also happens from time to time).
* Longhorn -> ?
Until now, no Windows version has worked as advertised. Yes, it has been steadily improving, but nothing compared to the robustness of Linux.
I only use Windows XP personally for games and p2p music piracy, but it is still bothersome to have to reboot all the time, or to use 3rd-party tools to close open files, etc. Not to mention the very disagreeable experience of spending 1 week deleting junk because I clicked on some “install” button in a popup window. These basic security issues are not solved in any Windows version up to date.
music piracy…too funny
you are stealing something that you can listen to over the airwaves for free, heck you can download for a pittance per song, and yet you choose to steal it ???
that is one thing I just do not get
You must download some major junk, i reboot maybe MAYBE once a week on my w2k….
At my work I had an only legacy Win2000 box that had uptime of 288 days. It was in production use and we could not take the system off-line and it was mostly up to date patches wise anyhow.
After I saw the up time I was pushing for 365 days, but I had to relocate the system so had to power down. We almost never need to reboot our WinXP boxes. The only time they are usually restarted are after automatic updates install.
I have an XP box at home with over 60 days of uptime.
I use XP at work. I reboot on fridays whether it needs it or not. The PC is nothing special. A 2.4 P4 with 512MB ram, etc..etc..
I tweaked the heck out of it to only run what it needs. hugely noticable difference.
Off topic (kind of):
My 2003 Server with ColdFusionMX, MySQL, and other services running makes it well over 1000 hours before. This is a development server too.
It seems most people realize that proprietary non-subscription software is always very temporal. Gates knows it, that’s why he wants to move to subscriptions. Apple doesn’t, but they have the best spending customers (even Apple geeks will agree that Mac fans are the most willing to buy software).
Anyway, eventually Microsoft will have to either make almost no money one Windows/Office and find another market to move into (another pc software market like xbox – hey it’s close enough to a PC) or they’ll find themselves with no one buying and slowly die out.
People won’t keep buying what they thought they already owned forever!
*Forget Windos, use Linux
*
Misspelled sould read Windows, not Windos. Although Windos reminds me of Windows 3.x
There’s a lot of my OS is better than your OS in these posts.
I don’t know if the posters above are incompetent or are supported by incompetent people but you are having experiences with Windows that shouldn’t happen.
I’ve said before that I work in a large company with 80,000 people worldwide. The desktop OSes are Windows NT, Windows XP and a little bit of OS X.
The 600 users I support in my site don’t reboot twice or three times a day. A large portion of these use NT and I have seen machines with uptimes of weeks. If a machine needs to be rebooted twice a day we re-image it with the OS or replace the PC. No messing about. I use XP and I reboot about once every two weeks.
In our office (a hub city for our company) we have about 80 Windows 2000 servers, around 10 NT4 Servers and 40 Windows 2003 servers. I don’t reboot any of these machines “when the mouse is clicked the wrong way, or at the wrong time”. We had a power down of our data centre in October. Most servers have been running since then. We have had to reboot some for relevant patches or other standard reasons. I have had a couple of machines that were behaving erratically but in both cases it was hardware.
I think the reasons for our reasonable uptimes are.
1: We employ people that know what they’re doing. I am an MCSE but that means nothing. I’ve seen MCSEs that I wouldn’t let near my desktop. I’m also experienced and reasonably knowledgeable about the systems I support and that means shitloads. 3 people are allowed on our servers and others are allowed on if they’re supervised so nobody is allowed mess about. We don’t experiment on our servers
2: We buy good servers. Our servers are redundant and fault tolerant (I’ve had to replace 3 hard drives this week) but the servers don’t go down when these fail. We just pop out the faulty part and replace it. Users don’t have a clue.
3: We buy good desktops. All of our machines are the same spec with the same network cards, video cards, motherboards etc. We don’t need the latest features and we don’t upgrade drivers unless it’s to fix a problem that we’ve experienced.
4: Our PCs are used for the apps we deploy to them. The users can’t install the latest junk spyware filled app from the internet. If they have a problem with their PC we troubleshoot it a small bit. If it takes longer than 30 mins we just re-image or replace. We don’t put on software unless it’s been tested in our lab and packeged by us for our SOE.
So for those of you that have to reboot 2 or 3 times a day either.
1: Get it fixed. It’s not normal and you shouldn’t accept it.
2: Complain to your manangement until they get it fixed.
3: Complain to your vendor until they get it fixed.
4: Fix it yourself.
If you can’t do 1, 2, 3 or 4 then either
5: Move to linux.
6: Live with it.
7: Complain to newsgroups about how crap MS is because you can’t get your windows working.