Microsoft recently announced that they are sticking to the cutoff date for Windows XP of June 30^th. They tried this in January, but everyone complained and it was extended to June. But so far, it looks like June 30^th will be the date. It is pretty amazing to think of how long Windows XP has lasted. For example, when it was released in October of 2001, the minimum processor to run it was a 233 MHZ processor, with 300 MHZ the recommended speed. Amazingly, they claimed you could run it on 64 MB of Ram, and that you only needed 1.5 GB to install it. As an interesting comparison, here are the system requirements for Vista:  1 GHz Processor, 1 GB memory, 15 GB of available hard drive space, and a 128 GB graphics card. Maybe that is why 99% of the computers we have sold in the past two years have still had XP on them. On identical hardware, Windows Vista is slower than Windows XP. Functionally, our users don’t see any improvements that justify the required extra expenses to get a machine fast enough to tolerably run Vista.  Windows XP still accounts for about 63 percent of all Internet-connected computers, according to March 2009 statistics from Hitslink, while Windows Vista makes up about 24 percent.

 

But don’t count Microsoft out yet. They have done more than just increase their Vista marketing budget to try and convince you that Vista is worth upgrading to. They have also been working on Windows 7. And, I must say, the future is bright. I have been using Windows 7 for a couple of weeks now on my work machine, and I love it.  I hope to get a blog up shortly telling you why I think it is much better than Vista. Now the only question is what to do after June 30^th?