Forum Moderators: phranque
Windows XP is shipping out preinstalled on a lot of new computers, but Microsoft is unhappy with corporate reluctance to upgrade existing PCs.An executive at one Microsoft customer, computer security firm SecureMethods, explained that there just isn't enough in Windows XP to justify the time and costs of upgrading.
In addition, a study in December found that 80 percent of companies still have some machines running Windows 95 or Windows 98. And at firms running the older operating systems, an average of 39 percent of desktops were running either Windows 95 or Windows 98, according to technology consultant AssetMetrix.
zeus
I'll probably have my next copmuter built with Win2000 to take advantage of faster processor speeds, etc.
The largest office I worked in had in excess if 1000 desktops. there was a 60/40 split between win2k and win98 with 2k being the most used.
A lot of companies have very customized software that has been developed on a certain system. Such companies feel that a move would not be of benefit. We also have to think in terms of productivity, and the loss the changeover to xp would produce in the learning period for each user.
Mack.
For home users that had windows 98 or ME... there are some benefits.
[edited by: idoc at 6:40 pm (utc) on April 13, 2004]
Cost and time involved are the main reasons.
Must admit I was very surprised.
But that's not surprising. How many 95 boxes could really run XP? That P133 screamer with 32 MB of RAM just doesn't cut it any more.
So as XP workstations are brought in for new tasks and 2003 Servers for new server apps, the 95 & 98 boxes are used as long as possible in corners of the business that don't demand the latest & greatest stuff. By the time these companies do get rid of them, they can hardly give them away.
It's not that XP is being rejected. It's being welcomed with open arms on new systems. And new systems are being welcomed. But bogging down a dinosaur computer with XP doesn't make sense to most people. If M$ thought they'd sell a ton of upgrades, they had unreasonable expectations.
95 and 98 are great for stand alone machines and that’s it
google for GAIM - available for mac, linux and windows
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As far as win98 vs XP - I used to have to reboot my desktop PC an average of 15 times per day with 98 as my system would get unstable and threaten a crash.
If you calculate 3-5 minutes for rebooting (plus closing programs, saving all open files and reopening them after the reboot) that was about an hour per day wasted.
When I installed XP my system was immediately more stable and I rarely have to reboot. As an experiment, I let my machine up and running for 4 days (24 hours per day) and the system never crashed once.
Separating the OS shell from the programs shell was the best thing that they could have ever done.
I use windows because I want to see my sites the way 96% of my site users do.
I also have an iBook running OS X, a PC with Mandrake Linux and a win98 with Netscape 4.7 installed - which I use for testing purposes.
However - I work in Windows, and XP has, for me, perfomed more than satisfactorily.
I've been looking for new computers shipping with Win 2000 so that I can use some of my older programs, especially AutoCAD. Does anyone know where to get new computers with Win 2000 preinstalled? I found some through Dell, but they were more than $2000 each.
If Windows 9x works and you don't NEED any of the new features of newer versions, then the only reason to upgrade would be if you needed to burn some cash to put yourself in a lower tax bracket.
We're now coming out of a three year crunch in IT spending. Few companies were doing the kind of mass OS rollouts we saw in the 90s; instead, stuff that broke got fixed, and that was about all. Putting XP on a PC that was working fine (and perhaps upgrading the hardware to accommodate it) didn't have the quick payback needed to justify it. Add to this equation the fact that there was a big surge in new PC installation in 1999 and many of these units are still in service, and you have a good explanation for the continued presence of Win9x PCs.
If you want a windows 2000 machine... and a D*ll...I would go to the D*ll outlet and save some money.
They simply don’t have the security features needed. The inability to handle NTFS and the security features connected with this file system makes 95 and 98 useless in a modern network environment.
rubbish! :-)
They have the best security feature of all - the Mac effect. Virus writers don't bother too much with the mac because of the smaller user base (don't believe any of that nonsense that it's more secure - as we've discovered this week it's not). If their virus doesn't make front page news, can only affect .0005% of the computers out there, and have no impact on businesses where's the glory in that?
Already a lot of security risks are XP only risks, despite NTFS. Know any Windows 98 PCs that were affected by blaster?
Stick with 98 (especially if you have 98SE), do your regular housekeeping tasks like scandisk and defrag so you don't suffer PatrickDeese's fate (whose machine not crashing now is only partly XP - but probably mostly because it's a clean install of the OS without clutter). Soon you'll be laughing as virus writers concentrate on bringing down Linux, XP and Windows 2006 machines :)
As for the older systems here, you will find some NT 4.0 and if you look real hard, maybe some NT 3.51, but they have been trying really hard to phase them out. You wouldn't find any 95 or 98 systems.
Frontpage is a swear word in web design. :)
Did someone just call FrontPage a "working tool"?!? ;)
People like me who used it to develop a network of sites into a full time business.
Try downloading OpenOffice.org...check out all the functionality this offers...and excellent compatability with MSOffice ... you can install this on a windows machine... you might find that it will serve all your needs and then you can join the open source movement via the side door...
I run (please don't yell at me) WindowsME (media version of 98) on one production machine and I recently purchased an Athlon64 bit machine that came pre-loaded with XP (the first machine I haven't built from the ground up..I must be getting lazy)...nice machine...XP works...but I will be installing a Linux Distribution on this machine to take advantage of the OS/64 bit stuff...
My personal office has an XP and 3 W2000 boxes. My laptop is still 98, only because I haven't figured out how to upgrade a laptop OS without losing all the built-in drivers.
Just have to buy a new laptop I guess.
FYI - I fdisk'd my entire HD several times while running under the win98 "regime". 98 just couldn't handle all the multitasking that I wanted to do.
My original workstation which was the first that I upgraded to XP was just that, an upgrade.
That machine is still in service, used by one of my assistants, and it has never needed an "fdisking" or reinstall of the OS.
I installed XP on my new workstation when I built it from scratch.
My new Dell laptop came factory installed with XP PRO (never used home ed) and I haven't had an problems with it either - but its not quite 2 months old - so that isn't much.
I could probably pull out my old Mac IIsi from 1993 and do most of what I do on my laptop with it - except that it has photoshop 2.65 installed on it, and I prefer 5.5+ ;) - so much easier to make web optimized images.
Maybe I should fire it up and see if my sites are compatible with Netscape 2.X....
zeus
