A campaign to save XP. Though I'm still using Windows 2000, myself.

most people are waiting to see if Windows 7 is any good.
Vista has failed if Microsoft kills XP more people will
switch to apple or Linux.

let XP die,it will just alienate the users

I have to admit, I didn't see what the big deal was - until I bought a Vista laptop for work ! With Office 2007, no less...

Wow, those products are amazingly bad! Not only did they totally change the interface (so you have to re-learn everything), but it also lost a lot of the functionality that I needed.

My solution is going to be running Office 2000 in Linux under wine. Make a boot-cd, and never have to deal with a reinstall again.

Did you get any training in Office 2007? I did and after a couple weeks of working with it I was able to work much faster and do things I didn't know were possible. Some of the things you can do in Excel 2007 are amazing, but you would never know it unless someone showed you.

I use 2000 and XP. I keep 2000 because it works OK and because I'm not sure that my elderly film scanner and other old apps will work with XP. With both Win variants I deactivate as many default Win services as I can live without. I would love to use UNIX, but with Windows I can run a wider variety of software and don't have to become a computer hobbyist. Of course a lot of Win software, including some of the most popular stuff, is bug-filled crap, but that is the tradeoff for variety and low price and I can live with it.

XP seems to be the best Win OS so far.

BG thinks he aught to be able to sell you a ham sandwich as part of the OS (look it up.) Why would anyone want to hand over so much power to such a man?

This convicted criminal does have one point. His competition should just compete better rather than whine about his unfair (and illegal) business practices.

VISTA is the best that ever happened, because it opens a small window of opportunity to break the chains. Keeping XP is not the answer. Real competition stepping up is. I used to maintain over a million line of business logic by my self because VB6 let me. We need a development tool for linux (Apple is a poor cousin to M$ with nicer chains) that allows better enterprise level development than VB6 (dotNet? Please, kill me now!)

I'm thinking a RAD/IDE (not Judith's) version of Euphoria with classlike moduler level file scopes and VBish debugger. The main thing the IDE needs to allow is drill down to declaration/definitions so I don't have to search all the time.

I'm not sure I'm up to the task myself, but I will be investigating the possibility. The end product of the compiler must be simple for users to install and run. Usability is one thing BG has usually done better than the competition (in ways that I despise, but customers seem to like. I personally prefer tools to do what I want rather than what the tool thinks I want, but users seem fine with tools that make choices for them.)

Euphoria sequence allocation and garbage collection seem to work better than anything else I've seen, but I wouldn't attempt enterprise level development in the language.

I like Vista... Office 2007, not so much. However, for a laptop, Vista is too bloated.

I'm still using 2000 on my laptop. We've got the same on the old Dell we use as a file server and XP on the desktop machine.

My better half is a hw/sw support type for the state Commerce Dept. They have been going to Vista for a few months. Support for this bloated memory pig has been awful. Most often questions are answered with, "...hmm, never heard of that before..."

The state big shots are considering going back to XP, and waiting for MS to get their water fowl into linear mode.

Well I think MS perceives this as a chicken and egg situation of providers not offering support for a O/S that no one has to run. If MS can crack that egg and can get a large bulk of consumers to employ Vista then the vendor support will gain traction. When the Vendors come on board and begin to offer compatibility for what enterprise level entities view as mission critical then you will see the corporate support begin to pick up.

I think Vista should have aimed at being a robust 64-bit solution. And set that performance stake out there far enough to entice hardware vendors to strive for something that could provide supercar levels of computing performance.

Also, a big are that Vista blew it was in the gaming experience. There were some elements of the Vista platform that interested gamers in Vista quite a bit before it came out. But how the Microsoft Live was implemented and lumped together with the Xbox 360 users just pissed a lot gamers off.

Linux (or any other OS: Solaris, OSX, FreeB-S-D) is in the same boat. You must upgrade or die. There's nothing specific to XP here.

The maintenance of an old release is expensive. Usually it's amortized over equipment purchases, but once you continue sticking to old equipment, costs go up fast (I'd say they "skyrocket", if this weren't a rocket blog). Check how much Red Hat charges for subscriptions (about a grand and a half a year per seat, last I checked). If Microsoft asked you to pay $1.5K for the privilege of retaining your XP, would you pay? But that's really how much it is.

The older the release gets, the more expensive it becomes. I'm not privy to how much Red Hat charges for extended contracts for AS 2.1, but I'm quite certain it's not the flat grand, it's way more. In terms of Microsoft we'd be talking 2000 Server.

These costs are just not sustainable no matter how you look at it. So, the petitioners are just crazy. The only alternative is not to have any support at all. Install your XP or your RHEL AS 2.1, and just keep it until the system dies, or gets rooted. By that time you won't be able to buy a replacement. That's what we're talking about.

I omitted mentioning that Linux opens an avenue for the endless software support by virtue of being open source. There's a guy who carries along 1.0, a release came out in December. But we're talking about a system which can only support 960MB or RAM period, no ACPI, no nothing. So, it's pretty much the area of emulation on the hardware side. I just don't think it's worthy any serious consideration. It's retrocomputing, not business.

P.S. Rand, "B-S-D" is "questionable content" according to comment filter.

Feeding IE Version 7 to the piranhas would brighten my day. Used it on someone else's computer convinced me to stick with Ver 6.

I'll consider Vista when the third patch has been released. So far the first one isn't out.