The slow road to Windows XP

CNet ^ | 2005-0615 | Ina Fried

[N3WBI3]

Here is the official lifecycle of MS desktop Operating systems (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/lifecycle/default.mspx)

With onyl XP to replace it, Im not too happy that soon we may have to migrate off of our 2K desktops. Especially as XP is going EOL at the end of next year! So companies will enither need to run a mixed environment (2k/XP) until Longhorn is released, or do two desktop migrations in two years... ugg

Oh well at least they let IT folks use what ever they want, they cant take my Linux box away frmo me ;)

[kezekiel]

Windows 2000 & Office 2000 here. Zero reasons to upgrade either for me.

[finnman69]

The name of the game in software is to get you to upgrade. it's the only way to keep money coming in. It's not just Microsoft.

[Banjoguy]

MsOffice is a crappy Office Suite...jump to Corel for real power or to Open Office.

http://www.openoffice.org/product/

[N3WBI3]

Im sorry I like OO, and run neo-office on my Mac but calc is not substitute for Excel...

[AbeKrieger]

Windows 2000 Pro is probably Microsoft's best OS to date.

[softwarecreator]

Agreed.  I have run Win 2000 on my home PC since 1999.

At one point I upgraded to .Net, went back to Win 2000

When Win 2003 came out, I tried that ... went back to Win 2000.

I am wondering why I would even need to upgrade to this 'Longhorn' when it comes out.

[Space Wrangler]

Win2K is the best Windows ever. Tons of hospitals and medical practices use it because of the better security, and have no wish to go to anything else. A friend of mine is a SysAdmin for a large medical practice and he says that there is no way MS can end support for it, no matter what they say. He said they expected to run 2000 for the next 5 years, and skip XP entirely.

[thebaron512]

Heck jump to a desktop Linux and reduce your M$ pain! No one really needs M$ software for anything.

Use Groupwise for e-mail and internal mail.

[ShadowAce]

My office here runs utterly pointless XP. The only things we use are Office apps and Adobe apps. 2K would be a much better choice, INHO, but the IT dept (in another state) runs scared of anything but MS and their latest offering.

[softwarecreator]

Tried Corel and it's okay, but MS Office is better.

[FreePaul]

I think Microsoft would obviously prefer they were running Windows XP...

Of course they do. They have absolute control over your use of XP. They don't have that kind of control on any of the earlier versions. If they could shut down all previous versions they would do it in a minute. As it is they are trying every minute.

[ShadowAce]

At one point I upgraded to .Net, went back to Win 2000

What does this statement mean?

[softwarecreator]

Come on, to say no one needs M$ is not very accurate, is it?

With the 'dependancy' issues inherit in Linux, the average user will find it too frustrating to 'convert'.

Why do people act like you can just plug in Linux and everything works perfectly, when we all know that this is simply not the case?

[softwarecreator]

It means I HATED Windows .Net and went back to Win 2000.

[softwarecreator]

I find XP too unstable and only use it when I have to.  I still prefer Win 2000.  I've tried every flavor of MS software and several of the Linux varieties, too, and nothing is quite as easy and stable as W2K.

[B Knotts]

but calc is not substitute for Excel...

What makes you say that? I know there are differences, but I haven't encountered any serious problems with oocalc in a long time.

I haven't ever really used Excel much, but I do exchange spreadsheets with Excel users.

[ShadowAce]

.Net is a development framework while 2000 is an OS. Do you mean XP?

[zeugma]

As far as windows goes, 2000 is definitely the best release that I've had to suffer through using.

[N3WBI3]

Nail, Head, Bang... I was never really happy with XP which is worlds above any of the windows family other than 2K. But it was such a sad step backwards for MS.

On the server side, I think 2K has been well replaced by 2K3 the LDAP is smoother, and DNS a bit cleaner. With iis7 MS finally is taking a hint from Apache and making things a bit more modular..