Join Date 10/2001

+21

Windows XP (OEM) to be phased out by year

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According to a report by famous tech news website Winbeta, Microsoft has decided to phase-out the OEM editions of Windows XP by the end of this year despite consumers resistance to adopt Vista due to compatibility issues and hardware requirements. As a result computer manufacturers will only be able to sale Vista loaded Pc's.

By early 2008, Microsoft's contracts with computer makers will require companies to only sell Vista-loaded machines.

Despite Microsoft's relentless promotion of Vista, manufacturers are still seeing plenty of demand from customers for systems preloaded with XP, especially in the finicky SOHO market.

For complete story, check the link provided

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Phoon

Join Date 10/2001

+382

this is completely assenine and a crock of shit! Excuse me, but I'm a tad pissed off about this.
If I wanted a piece of garbage forced down my throat I would ask for it.

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Ok, I am just interested, I am not very computer savyy about some of the Names of things. What does OEM mean. Thanks , still learning. Have Vista, like it. but not as well as my XP, got a new computer , already loaded. It was expensive to upgrade a lot of my software and some I can't use at all.

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OEM XP should be phased out, but not that soon. wait until Vista is corrected. there is no way it'll be done by then.

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Jafo

Join Date 03/2001

+1845

OEM phasing out isn't that much of an issue....as long as the OS is still commercially available as an option for those frantically hanging on to the past.....[like me]...

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Chasbo

Join Date 01/2005

+1041

Why should OEM XP be phased out? Vista Vista Vista - I am sick of hearing about it! Having said that it's because my machine could only run basic and I can't afford a new machine. Sour grapes. On the other hand it would be wise of Microsoft to give people more choice in what OS they can have.

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i will fight vista to the bitter end.

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Good riddance, I can't stand XP after being on Vista since it went RTM. When I go to work and have to use XP everything is so much slower and less responsive. Glad to hear its getting the well deserved boot.

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Chasbo

Join Date 01/2005

+1041

I use 2 different types of Macs at work and 2000 professional. At home it's XP home. So I've been around the block a few times. I've only played with Vista in the store. There are so many things that can affect the speed a computer runs at. Astyanax0 - Is the XP computer you use at work connected to a network? What sort of work is the computer used for? Is the computer defragged and are all the service packs installed? Has the registry been cleaned? Is it spyware and virus free? All these things make a difference as far as the speed of the computer. If you take a Vista machine and put it on a screwed up network, then you let the machine get mucked up, no defrag, let spyware get on it, yadda yadda - It will slow to a crawl no matter how much RAM etc it has. It's apples and oranges my friend. If you let a Mac go without any maintenance at all it will eventually crap out too. I've read more than a few articles comparing Vista and XP speed. From what I can see XP is over all still faster. Actually it's pretty close between the two. Vista runs more services. Vista needs more RAM. Vista is more expensive. I'll stick with XP for now cause I have to but I don't mind. With Windowblinds etc. it's a pleasure to use. I make sure all the maintenance is done on the machine and it's as fast as I want it to be. It's good to go my friend.

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chasbo i totally agree.

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ZubaZ

Join Date 11/2001

+917

OEM means the OS preinstalled on vendors PCs.

Why shouldn't MS require that manufactures ship with the "best and brightest" product they have?

How will this affect the average user? Not at all I think. The average user doesn't care about the OS. They want to surf the web, chat, maybe balance a checkbook and write a letter.

If they are power users and want XP for whatever reason they can buy a PC with no OS and then purchase XP and install it.

MS is not phasing out support yet. They are just not letting vendors sell their older product. Seems to make good sense to me.

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all i know is that vista runs 5-10 times faster on my machine than XP did and thats with not changing any hardware. I have upgraded my memory since but thats it. and my specs:
AMD Athlon 64 3800+ 2.4Ghz
2GB Ram
Visiontek ATI Radeon X1300 512 MB ram

and vista ran amazingly better than XP. since them i've upgraded to 4GB of ram just so video games run a bit better. and compusa just had a good sale.

And out of the 60 programs i have installed i've only had trouble with 3. Panda Antivirus wouldn't work because they didn't update their software to work with vista so i had to use a basic version. Motorola Mobile Phone Tools needed special drivers. and Need for Speed Carbon has a tendency to crash. but it crashed all the time in XP so i dont think that has anything to do with vista. thats just EA doing a crappy job.

so honestly i dont know why you all are bitching about compatibility and all. i upgraded a little over 2 weeks after the launch date, found all my drivers within 2 hours and haven't had any trouble (aside from those 3) since. I have found that Photoshop gets slowed down by aero a bit, but not enough to cause any trouble.

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Chasbo im not some noob end user lol, I work for a consulting company that does IT support for mortgage companies.

Computer Specs:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ Toledo 2.2GHz
OCZ Platinum Series DDR400 2GB (2x1GB) 2-3-2-5 T1
Abit KN8 v1.1 nForce 4 Motherboard
ATi connect3D Radeon X1950XTX 512MB
Thermaltake Truepower Trio 550w

And about 3 hard disks, 1 200GB and 2 80GB.

My boot time is nearly cut in half, in between sessions in which a reboot is needed are twice as long if not more and memory management dances around XP's wile senselessly beating it to death.

The generic PC is not all that great, some are decent with a standard 2.4ghz p4 and a gig of ram, sorry but even that is pathetic to me, the performance still isnt as good as it could be, get off XP, its nearly 7 years old and its time has come.

And the only compatibility issue I had was having to download my sound card drivers (Realtek AC'97) and throw them on one of my backup drives before I switched. If you find that to be troubling and you are pretty good at computers then I must say that is pretty damn sad.

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Sour grapes on M$ part I think. No one wants to buy their newest toy so now they will force it down our throats. Thank (insert your deity here) that MFG's are seriously considering Linux as an option during a PC build. My personal gripes on Vista are the hardware snafus, which will probably get worked out sooner or later, the obvious lean towards DRM satisfaction rather than user satisfaction, the lofty hardware requirements - making upgrading an expensive option, the annoying UAC (I know you can disable it but then what's the point of it?), and last but not least: the fact that this Vista could have been effectively marketed as an upgrade to XP rather than a whole new OS! That one really gets at me. This OS (AFAICS) offers little benefit for upgrading (IMHO), you are better off buying a whole new system, which is probably what M$ and the PC Mfg's had planned all the time, although now it seems not be working out as planned. I have XP and use Kubuntu Linux PCs right now. Xp is now a mature OS, the ins and outs of this OS have been ironed out (mostly) and I believe users can use it effectively for what they need to do, so why rush to upgrade? I don't know, that's why I didn't. To tell you the truth, nowadays my Kubuntu Linux PC gets most of the internet action these days, leaving XP to do my games, web publishing, and office tasks. I won't be upgrading to Vista ever, I'm not trying to be vindictive or rebellious or anything against M$, I do like M$, I just can't think of a reason to spend my bucks just to have more problems using Vista!!

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Phoon

Join Date 10/2001

+382

they can buy a PC with no OS

That is incorrect. You cannot buy a top name brand PC without an OS.

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Yes you can, I've read Dell is offering it. Unless that has changed... I don't keep up with the proprietary crap.

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and who is going to buy a top brand name PC without OS ?
I prefer to pick the parts myself, last pc was 2/3 of the money for 3/2 of the speed

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ZubaZ

Join Date 11/2001

+917

That is incorrect. You cannot buy a top name brand PC without an OS.

I never said top name brand PC. I said they can buy a PC. And they can.

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Phoon

Join Date 10/2001

+382

get off XP, its nearly 7 years old and its time has come.

What you are forgetting here is that an overwhelming amout of business applications will not work with Vista. An overwhelming amount of hardware will not work with Vista. It's sad that vendors delayed being ready for it. There was more than ample time for them to prepare.

In a large business organization you are not going to see management spend the money for this either.
A) The training involved with a large amount of employees would cost quite a bit and cause a drastic loss in productivity. Support costs would also increase.

The hardware costs.. nuff said there.

I work for one of the top IT Outsourcing companies in the world, supporting IT for a very large healthcare organization which owns approx 130 Hospitals throughout the US. You can't imagine how behind the software companies are and the costs associated with upgrading in this industry. Windows 2000 is still quite strong here.

At least the Enterprise Licensing for Vista is backwards compatible and will allow us to continue installing XP on new systems.

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Phoon

Join Date 10/2001

+382

I don't keep up with the proprietary crap.

Yes, large companies are knocking down the doors of their local "Joe's PC Barn" to have a custom built rig for their thousands of employees to use....

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Chasbo

Join Date 01/2005

+1041

Astyanax0 - For someone who is only 19 sounds like you have quite a job. You must be very sharp.

The computer that you are talking about is your home rig? The reason I ask is that I have found there to be a big difference between a computer that people customize for personal use and the ones that are used on the job. In my case the Mac I use at work is still running 9.2. Our only OSX machine is only up to 10.3 because 10.4 had trouble communicating with the older pc servers and Mac machines. I work for a newspaper hence we are all Quark and Photoshop. Because of the old machines we are still using Quark 4 and are only up to Photoshop 7. Although this is all outdated equipment and software we manage to put out a Daily Newspaper with a circulation of around 60,000 copies. Most companies are like that. Like Phoon said in #18.

Astyanax0 - Your machine sounds like it is very nice. Hot like a Ferrari I suppose but the truth is most of us are driving a Ford Focus.

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NightTrainthedark

Join Date 07/2003

+255

all i know is that vista runs 5-10 times faster on my machine than XP did and thats with not changing any hardware. I have upgraded my memory since but thats it.

Ummmm.........

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ZubaZ

Join Date 11/2001

+917

Phoon, I work for a rather large outsourcing company. and we are actively moving to Vista long with our clients and partners (including Dell).

We have seen very few XP applications that fail to run on Vista with existing hardware. And for most users, Vista runs close enough to XP that very little training is needed. (Granted, our COE image puts the most common tools and apps on the desktop to avoid many possible problems.) (As an aside, we are more leery of the new office suite in regards to training . . it's going to be a mess!)

In regards to hardware, almost everything we have and support has enough oomph to run Vista as well as XP. And with a typical 3 year lease/upgrade cycle on PCs the hardware . . any issues can be resolved by waiting until next cycle or speeding up the process.

We heard the same arguments when XP, 2000, and even NT came around. MS stopped OEMing those too and the world didn't end.

For the average home user (and desktop customizer who frequents this site) making Vista the default Microsoft OS will have little or positive impact.

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Daiwa

Join Date 07/2001

+351

I've purchased a copy of XPP and put it on the shelf just in case. I have mixed feelings about Vista - the OEM versions that are shipping with most affordable PC's are less capable graphically than XP, which strikes me as an odd "upgrade" strategy on Microsoft's part. Having to pay a premium price for an OS to get what XP will do already?

A Mac with Parallels is looking better all the time.

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Phoon

Join Date 10/2001

+382

Zubaz,
That is encouraging news and perhaps it is not as daunting a task as I am fearing. I am running it on my system at work as a test and I have found quite a few of our CORE, CRITICAL applications that will not run under it. The vendor has plans to have it Vista ready by the end of the year.
Many of our web based apps will not run on IE7 either, so we are forced to stick with IE6.
I do agree that Office 2007 is a larger training nightmare than Vista will be, but Vista will still flood the help desk, I'm relatively certain of that.
Hardware... no way, no how on about 60% of our current systems. In this facility alone, that number represents about 300 systems, and we are more up to date than most of the sister facilities.

Curious, what outsourcing company are you with?

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Lantec

Join Date 07/2003

+346

Phoon, I work for a rather large outsourcing company. and we are actively moving to Vista long with our clients and partners (including Dell).

I thought you got swallowed up by corporate Stardock.........

Question, Do you find Vista faster, slower or about the same in day to day work flow. I'm not interested in games or movie playing, just the mundane stuff, sending email writing letters running your regular business apps etc.

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