The MMO Notebook

Posts Tagged ‘windows xp’

Microsoft today announced that their aging operating system, Windows XP, has officially moved away from Mainstream Support and has transitioned into what they term as the Extended Support level. What this means to you is that Microsoft will no longer offer free support for Windows XP. Any problem you may have with the OS that requires a phone call to Microsoft will also require that you pull out your credit card.

Windows XP has served us well , so don’t free too much over it. The venerable OS has been on the market for over seven years. Microsoft usually only offers five years of mainstream support. They will still provide free security patches via Windows Update, but no new features will be added nor old ones fixed. More information can be found in this article over at Computerworld.

My advice: don’t buy a new computer until Windows 7 (the successor to Vista) comes out. Windows 7 is what Vista should have been. It will be worth the wait and you won’t need to suffer through Vista’s many annoyances.

The problems with Windows Vista are myriad and well-known since the day it went on sale. Subsequent updates and service packs have done a great job at getting the operating system running as it should, but the stigma of performance and compatibility issues continue to harass Microsoft.  In fact, the problems are so well-known that even the government has heard about it.

The state of Texas has banned the use of Windows Vista on all government computers. Senator Juan Hinojosa, Democrat, says “Windows XP is just fine, thank you very much.”  Who knew the government was tech savvy? Microsoft sees it as a slight against the company.  I think they should see it as an opportunity to fix their software.

To be fair, a fully patched Windows Vista does run much better than it did when it launched.  My biggest gripe with it is that it is still a memory hog.  I once had a Sony Vaio with Vista Home Premium on it. On a fresh boot, with only minimal start-up programs running, it still used almost 2GB of RAM before I launched any of my programs. That is ridiculous.

I ordered a Lenovo S10 netbook computer and it just arrived today.  It has a 10.2″ screen, Atom processor, 512mb RAM, 80gb hard drive, wifi, camera, express card, etc.  I have only messed around with it for a couple of hours but I am already impressed.  It runs well, even with just 512mb of RAM.  I have a Kingston 2gb stick on the way that I only paid $17 for.  It is amazing how cheap RAM is these days.  I also bought a bluetooth module for it from Ebay and will be installing it when it arrives.

I will post a review of the unit once I have had more time with it.  I plan to dual boot Windows XP (which it comes with) and OS X.  I have missed using OS X since moving to my Alienware laptop.  More to come as time permits.