When Windows XP Goes Away, HP Thinks Businesses Will Start Buying PCs Again

Business Insider ^ | 06/15/2013 | Kevin McLaughlin

[Lazamataz]

7's had some glitches with me.

Not as bad as Vista, but it's no XP.

[mikrofon]

You sir, are a Neanderthal Luddite ....

[afraidfortherepublic]

I’m still running Win98 on a couple of my computers. And XP on the rest, except for one Vista and one Win 7. I can’t tell the difference most of the time. It bothers me far more when they change the Office Suite.

I find Office 2010 difficult to navigate. They’ve moved and hidden all my favorite tabs. I like the 2003 version much better.

[tacticalogic]

Oddly, the "Open Source" proponents don't mention the the open source project called Classic Shell over at Source Forge that let's you have the Windows XP desktop on Windows 7 or 8.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/classicshell/?source=directory

[Zeneta]

I will not give up my XP.

Microsoft dropped support for XP ?

Because it works without them.

[Carriage Hill]

Install this:

http://www.ubit.ch/software/ubitmenu-languages/

Then hit Menu on that crappy Ribbon Menu, and Office 2003 all comes back like it was. On all Office Suite Products. Sweet.

[longtermmemmory]

HP does not “get it”.

MS does not “get it”

not even apple gets “it”.

we don’t want to and will not spend money unless it saves money. I will not spend money for a “pretty screen”.

If buying ONE win 8 box means I can fire one employee and have the rest do their work then it might work.

[Edward Teach]

"Windows 8 is not designed for desktop users who have work to do."

Not true. You just need to spend a little time getting familiar with it. It took me about 20 min.

[Chode]

yup... i have imaged my disk to an external drive and do so for backup, if i have to buy a new box, guess what gets put on it

[Carriage Hill]

I miss DOS2-3 in 1986-7, the basic 9 command prompts, black screen w/ orange type, on my old IBM PS2/50. Heh. I still go to command prompt, just for grins, to keep in practice. I’m a dinosaur, too.

[Zeneta]

I need some advice and some help.

I have an HP Laptop, 4 years old, running Vista.

Not long ago it crashed and won’t start.

Power up, and I can hear the drive spin and search for about 5 seconds, then it dies.

I don’t have a “boot disc” or the ability to F* out of the boot up.

Any thoughts on this would be greatly accepted.

[kingu]

I'm the only one on Windows 8 at work. Of course, like almost every business user out there, I live in the ‘desktop’ window, and almost never have any of the Metro interface working. (I do, ahem, use it for music to listen to while working...)

Now, the day the new PC arrived, I had sitting next to me Windows 7 to install on the PC. I had automatically assumed that Windows 8 would be an utter failure, and any ‘playing’ I did on the system would be to humor the person who didn't really want to splurge on the cost of the OS.

Instead we used that disc to upgrade the (lone) Vista machine to 7.

I get about 40% more work done in the day since going to 8. About half of that improvement is simply due to the increased performance of the machine I'm working on. Windows 8 has drastically raised the bar for performance specs, and while it will operate on a stripped down machine, most business class machines aren't stripped down.

The other half comes from improved memory handling. I deal with a considerable amount of online content as part of my daily work. Many of those windows are massive in size, and my typical day before the new machine would be get half way through the day, and then start all over again, as I had to shut down all my windows, load them back up, and continue on. It was a huge time waster each day.

Like any business user, I do not run any metro based apps as part of my work (I do use the Music program, which has mostly replaced my Zune...) All of my work takes place on the desktop interface. And I use a combination of IE10 and Chrome (Chrome mostly for webmail interfaces, IE10 for all the company webwork.)

Here's the bad parts about Windows 8. 1) Come on, Microsoft? Can you think of a worse way of handling software updates than to shut someone down in the middle of the work day 3 days after the upgrade arrives? You need to pay attention to when updates have been downloaded, or else you'll get a surprise ‘your system is shutting down in a half hour, you may want to save your work now’ message, with zero methods to delay this time waster.

2) Logging in using a Windows Live ID... No business wants you to drag your apps from home onto the office PC, and this has got to get eliminated in business versions of Windows 8. It is nice for the home user to have multiple computers with the same apps, but that ends at the office doorway. Yep, completely solved by using a different ID for work, but that isn't Microsoft's goal.

3) An awful lot of opportunity to get distracted - from the simple mistake of hitting that windows key (and being transferred right back to the metro interface) or from taking the cursor towards the side of the screen to scroll down a page (and having the search/etc tab pop in..)

The good, however, vastly outweighs the problems, and it works very well for me. Testing others on the same system shows similar improvements for what we're doing. For what most of the rest of the world are doing? Probably wouldn't assist them. Windows XP would still work out just fine today as it would ten years from now.

So in the end, Windows 8 works for me. Would I transform the average office to it? Not in a million years. They seriously need to strip out the entire metro interface for most business installations, disable the pop-ins, and the Windows Live IDs. For a home user? I'd suggest that it would give a generally much improved experience, especially over the average Windows XP machine. Just be utterly aware that whatever mail you get on a Windows Live ID (hotmail, MSN, Outlook.com) will dramatically and immediately change the advertising you'll see on web pages.

Google might be the search king, but in having instant changes to ads aimed at the web surfer, Microsoft has your number. Then again, Yahoo has gone out of their way to make their mail utterly unusable, while Google has improved theirs.

All in all, would I pay extra money for Windows 8 at home? No. Would I go out of my way to re-install Windows 7 on a Windows 8 computer? No. But I'd sure deeply consider a touch screen over a standard monitor, and would prefer Windows 8 for a laptop than Windows 7.

[Cyber Liberty]

I didn’t know HP still makes PCs. I thought they just sold under-priced printers and way over-priced ink cartridges.

I can understand HP’s pleasure with new Operating Systems being released frequently because it allows them to declare vast numbers of their old printers unsupported, causing them to need replacement. Many hands were rubbed in glee at HP when computers started shipping with Vista, rendering a large number of perfectly working printers useless because their drivers were broken.

[ctdonath2]

Apple is about at 25% of the market, if you consider that every tablet would have been a computer (for email, web, common uses) of some brand if not for the iPad.

[Zeneta]

BTW, you can buy XP really cheap.

Just pick up an old Machine online (maybe 50 bucks) and the code should be on a sticker on the box.

You can use that code on any machine.

[tacticalogic]

If you’re really hard-core, you install 2012 Server Core.

[VanDeKoik]

good riddance!

Let old farts and cheapskates keep XP on their old Pentium 4s.

They will still be sittting here bragging about being able to ping a server 12 years from now like it was some victory over Microsoft for darin to make new OSs.

[Chode]

yup

[JDoutrider]

HP has had major motherboard problems in their dv6 and dv9’s. I have given HP the big thumbs down after suffering with their crap for the last decade and a half. If that is the model you have... good luck! Motherboards ain’t cheap!

[Pikachu_Dad]

Get a boot disk. You have to e abe to diagnose the problem.