XPiring soon, we hope not!

News has it that Microsoft will stop selling Windows XP by June 30^th this year. Originally it was slated for an even earlier retirement which was end 2007. Mainstream tech support would run till April 2009 and ‘extended’ tech support for patches and security updates would be through April 2014. This has created a big fuss from consumers and businesses as everyone is still not convince on the stability and reliability of Windows Vista, just yet. Personally I am a big advocate of Microsoft products but I seriously have a bone to pick with Microsoft and its prodigal son that is Vista.

Yes it has tons of bells and whistles with the kitchen sink thrown in but does it really justify corporations and general consumers to upgrade their hardware as well learning a new interface? Among the concerns are the obscene amount of memory and hard disk space it requires to run and don’t even get me started with the 3^rd party drivers for your printers and accessories that are still pretty much non-existent to date. My Logitech QuickCam will NOT support Vista, go figure.

I personally run both Vista & XP (dual-boot) in my home machine but I find myself booting up as XP 80% of the time. Vista requires more resources to run and honestly 2 gigs of RAM in my books just made the cut to run it within acceptable parameters. This leaves regular users whose intended purpose just to run word processing and a spot of internet use out in the cold. If I was not running a higher than average spec rig I would never even consider installing Vista. So if a Microsoft supporter like me would not even migrate over totally, what more for the masses that have already found the comfort zone which is XP. No wonder the masses are crying foul over the imminent forced retirement of XP.

Coming from the bitter tasting version that was Windows ME the move over to XP was a godsend. I was very receptive to XP from the get go since I was coming from the horrible experience that was Windows ME and yes while there were issues until the more stable service pack 2 (SP2) to the latest SP3 came about, in a nutshell it was what I was looking for in a decent functional OS. Naturally everyone else finally warmed up to XP and for the past 7 years come October 2008 (has it been that long?) it has been a good and loyal OS to work on.

There has been a lot of anxiety among the technologist and consumers alike regarding Vista and with the imminent discontinuity of XP. What is the purpose of XP support if new systems do not come with XP after June 30^th? Microsoft is also saddle with a class-action lawsuit in federal court for misleadingly advertising that computers sold with XP were capable of running Vista. The suit states that PCs with the label ‘Windows Vista Capable’ were not powerful enough to run all of Vista’s features.

Is there a light at the end of this tunnel? Possibly maybe, as Microsoft has done some posturing lately that would give signs to a potential change of mind or date extension. They announced that they will be selling a version of XP for use on new, low-cost computers which are designed for word processing, e-mail and web surfing through June 2010 at least. Targeted at students and first-time PC adopters in emerging markets as well as developing countries brings the possibility that Microsoft sees potential in this market segment. So if it’s good enough for that market, why wouldn’t it be good enough for the middle-class consumer? Enquiring minds would like to know. Please Microsoft; keep XP till you let Vista do some growing up. Till then I am running most of my critical stuff (games) on XP and just boot to Vista to look at the pretty wallpapers once in awhile.