quote:
Originally posted by CookieRevised
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Originally posted by ShawnZ
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Originally posted by Jarrod
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Originally posted by ShawnZ
windows XP isn't supported by microsoft anymore
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Originally posted by Microsoft
We plan to provide support for Windows XP until 2014.
*checks date
sources: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-xp/future.aspx
http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?LN=en-gb&C2=1173
mainstream support is over 
Which means nothing for the normal consumer.... XP will be supported till 2014 as Jarrod said.
The only difference between mainstream and extended support is that you can't claim a warranty anymore, or request a feature change. And free incident/personal support isn't given anymore either. All things which are hardly used anyways (most people don't even know they exist or where to go to request that kind of support).
And it is not because MS stops all support for an OS that the OS suddenly wouldn't work anymore or that people stop using it or stop developping for it. Bug-wise XP has become very mature, which is something you can hardly say about Vista and Win7. Although Vista and Win7 are, out-of-the-box, indeed more secure than XP. But that also means they are, out-of-the-box, more 'restricted' (which some people find very annoying).
Personaly I would not switch to Win7, especially if you are used to XP and already have some computer experience. If you are just a 'beginner', than it might be another case. Either way, personaly I think it is still way to early and there are still too many problems with it (especially driver-wise).
Oh, and performance-wise: both Vista and Win7 run slower than XP in my experience. That is, the thing is that most people do not make a fair comparisson. They compare a very much used XP on a pentium4 with a brand new Win7 on a quad core so to speak. Of course Win7 and your programs, are going to run faster in that case.
But if compare all the (32bit) OSs on the same machine, with the same amount of usage and programs (the more you do, install, remove, etc on an OS, the slower it eventually gets in the long run), with the same default out-of-the-box settings (eye-candy etc), than you would find that XP is the faster though.
Of course the question can be if such a comparisson is usefull. I mean, why would you run a 32-bit XP on a brand new 64-bit quad core monster with 6GB of RAM? So, in the end, the question shouldn't be which is faster, but is your PC powerfull enough to benefit from the new OS? If so, then by all means get the newer OS. If not, then you will not gain much performance by installing a newer OS, on the contrary, everything might run a lot slower.
Then there is also the work performance of yourself. Using the new OSs (Vista and Win7) also means learning a few new things as the user interface is changed compared to XP and its predecessors. Many stuff can't be found anymore in the places you are used to, but are moved somewhere else. For some people this might be a problem. This is by the way one of the reasons (together with the obvious extremely high costs) why companies will not move to new OSs as fast. In fact it usually takes many many years before they move to a new OS.
I generally agree with what you said, my Dell PC was originally meant for XP and I intend to leave it that way, too many programs and tweaks installed so probably not worth the effort. In addition, my current sound card, HP printer and HP scanner lack drivers for Vista and Win7.
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Originally posted by andrewdodd13
...Your PC will probably run Windows 7 just fine, but I think the CPU/GPU will be knocking the low 2-3 scores...
I installed Win7 RC in a separate hard drive for testing purposes and also to get familiar with the GUI. It actually felt very good, boot time was much improved (however Norton Internet Security was not installed which increases boot time), and in general I felt very comfortable working with the new GUI, it also felt quite fast and responsive. These are the "Windows Experience Index" scores as rated by Windows 7:
PROCESSOR: 4.0 (P4 3.06GHz HT)
MEMORY (RAM): 4.3 (2Gb RDRAM)
GRAPHICS: 5.9 (ATI RADEON 800XT)
GAMING GRAPHICS: 4.6 (ATI RADEON 800XT)
PRIMARY HARD DISK: 4.9 (I used a very old IDE IBM 60Gb HD for testing)
BASE SCORE: 4.0 (Determined by lowest subscore)
It seems that my 8 year old Dell is performing much better than expected!
