One of Microsoft's most hated operating systems (Windows ME is difficult to beat on that front) is destined to die in less than a month.
Windows Vista, launched to a less-than-stellar reception on January 30, 2007, saw most of its support stopped back in 2012. On April 11 this year the hammer finally falls. Microsoft warned Vista users that their systems could be compromised by an attacker in the future, especially as Security Essentials support has also now ended for the operating system.
"Windows Vista customers will no longer receive new security updates, non-security hotfixes, free or paid assisted support options, or online technical content updates from Microsoft," Redmond said.
"Microsoft has provided support for Windows Vista for the past 10 years, but the time has come for us, along with our hardware and software partners, to invest our resources towards more recent technologies so that we can continue to deliver great new experiences."
My heart does ache for our brethren, the poor, huddled Windows masses.
Related Stories
Betanews reports on an announcement from Microsoft regarding its Windows 10 operating system:
[...] come May 9 it will stop updating the original release, known as 1507. The software giant had intended to stop supporting that release on March 26, but pushed back the deadline.
additional coverage:
Computerworld
related story:
Microsoft Kills Windows Vista On April 11: No Security Patches, No Hot Fixes, No Support, Nada
(Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Monday March 20 2017, @01:39AM (3 children)
”Windows ME is difficult to beat on that front”? Well, we may have a winner with Windows 10, though. We just had a vague idea before that Windows was really owned by its master in Redmond and served our purposes only at their sufferance, but Windows 10 was when they finally pulled out all the stops and told everyone that all your computer are belong to us. “And now whereas Windows 7 did lade you with a heavy yoke, Windows 10 will add to your yoke: Windows 7 hath chastised you with whips, but Windows 10 will chastise you with scorpions.”
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2017, @02:09AM
Well, there was the GWX thing chewing up bandwidth and doing an install behind your back.
There's the privacy thing as well.
...but once it's installed has anyone had large -breakage- problems with Redmond's latest?
-That- was the thing about LoseME.
Numerous times at the other site, Hairyfeet described this. [google.com]
MICROS~1 tried to make ME work with both NT-compatible device drivers AND 9x-compatible ones.
Stick with all one type or the other and you were fine.
Mix them and BOOM.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2017, @03:55AM (1 child)
Really? Most people seem to really like it, it's actually usable, fast and stable. I've heard a handful of neckbeards rant about privacy occasionally.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18 2017, @05:51PM
>...actually usable, fast and stable...
It IS those things. It IS likeable on the user end, (mostly). The issue is not the UX, it's the 'price' paid for this shiny wonder.
What if a good relation of yours, someone you trust completely & have invested a lot with- turned around and spoke to the neighborhood about you.
Despite your dear friend's good cooking (or more salacious gifts), would you not feel betrayed or edgy when forced to continue to invest with them?
Yes the OS smells & tastes great, just know that the data collectors & Redmond money machine thinks the same about you. You are not their customer, you are their cattle.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2017, @01:42AM (9 children)
For both people still running Windows Vista!
(Score: 1) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Monday March 20 2017, @01:50AM (8 children)
Windows 7 is a Windows Vista point release. (NT 6.1 IIRC, Vista was 6.0).
All of the bad things with respect to DRM are still in Windows 7. What happened was that vendors had time to debug their drivers, even accounting for the Protected Media Path.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2017, @02:01AM (6 children)
Great care was taken to keep backwards compatibility in Windows 7 (compared to Vista), and the number 6.1 was chosen because of apps doing version checks, and not to scare developers away. Actually a lot of the core was heavily refactored in Windows 7, tasks scheduled to fire off at the same time to reduce hard disk usage, the memory management was heavily changed, and there were huge pieces of work in other areas of the kernel32.dll (being split into kernel32 and kernelbase). Under the hood, Windows 7 tries to stay as compatible as possible, but it was a huge effort internally with lots of changes, and the numbering (6.1) was somewhat deceptive.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by frojack on Monday March 20 2017, @04:37AM (5 children)
As Microsoft releases go, win 7 was actually a pretty good OS. Probably the last decent OS they've made. (Again, with the caveat that we are talking only about windows here). Some would go so far as to say that Window 7 is the best OS Microsoft has ever delivered.
Its relatively light weight, wit will fit in much less memory than most people think, and works rather well.
Win 7 pretty well repaired the reputation damage Vista had done.
The big problem is that they stepped away from that in windows 8, and 8.1 and pursued that banal interface which brought the whole ecosystem to its knees again.
Two self inflicted wounds in the span of 3 to 5 years.
Then they decided to make Windows 10 an advertising platform, just when people are showing signs of having had it up to HERE with advertising and un- apologetically started using ad-blockers.
Nobody will miss vista. But a lot of users will miss Windows 7.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by julian on Monday March 20 2017, @05:32AM (4 children)
Technically Windows 10 is much better than Windows 7, and worth upgrading to--at least the Pro or Enterprise versions. Just the security improvements are worthwhile, but it's actually lighter on resources than Windows 7. MS doesn't seem to backport their kernel improvements, so Windows 7 is pretty outdated at this point. If you absolutely need Windows, I recommend Windows 10...but you probably don't need Windows.
I still haven't seen any of these ads in Windows 10. Maybe they're not pushing it to Win10 Pro users (yet). I also turn my PC off (fully off with PSU hardware switch) just about every day, so I don't deal with the Windows Update wanting to turn off at inconvenient times problem. I suppose there are people who want their Windows computer to run for months without rebooting, but that's not how I've ever used computers.
If I was having to deal with either of those issues I'd probably hate Windows 10. It does have the spying stuff, but that's been there since XP. I'm aware of it. I don't like it. That's why I have other machines running Linux that get used more often.
(Score: 2) by TheReaperD on Monday March 20 2017, @12:07PM (1 child)
You have to install a tool such as Spybot anti-beacon in order to keep the ads out of Windows 10 (running it myself). Otherwise, forget it.
Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit
(Score: 2) by julian on Tuesday March 21 2017, @04:44AM
I've not installed such a tool and I still haven't seen any ads. I'm sure Windows is (or, at least is capable of) spying on everything that goes on in my computer, but that has been true since XP. I already don't trust Windows.
It is networked to my other computers, however. This worries me, since it could be used as a beachhead into my network, other machines, and server not running Windows. I'm not sure how to mitigate this without making the machine impractically inconvenient to use. It has to have access to my NAS, for example.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2017, @12:37PM
Only ignorant idiots recommend Windows 10 for anything but may be games. It is the same idiots that buy consoles. No flavor of Windows 10 has a place in a business environment nor should it be used just for surfing the internet. Spyware and adware simply has no place on any device. Nobody should recommend to anyone to install spyware or adware.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2017, @01:26PM
I don't know about the technical merits, but I know the non-technical problems it has are enough that I wouldn't even install it if it magically turned my computer into a quantum computer.
At some time in the past, Windows was an operating system which I didn't like, but which I would trust (note that I'm speaking about the OS, not Microsoft itself). Nowadays that trust is gone.
(Score: 1) by WillR on Monday March 20 2017, @04:15PM
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2017, @01:44AM
And nothing of value was lost.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Monday March 20 2017, @02:00AM (9 children)
I went from Win98 to Linux, then Linux to Win 8, Win 8.1, Win10. Why? Games. Linux sux if you like games.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by el_oscuro on Monday March 20 2017, @02:23AM (2 children)
I guess that is true if you want crappy "Triple A" games. But sometimes those don't work on Windows either. Me, I have more games on Linux than I can possibly ever finish.
I now have the same problems as most Windows users WRT games: I installed the Linux native "Aliens: insurrection", but my ancient video card isn't up to the task. I am planning on upgrading to a nvidea 1050 [amazon.com]. I was originally thinking about a 960, but it requires a full size case and a dedicated power supply.
SoylentNews is Bacon! [nueskes.com]
(Score: 2) by Zyx Abacab on Monday March 20 2017, @07:33AM
It's much, much more than triple-A games. Sure, the proportion of new games that are compatible with Linux is trending upward; but the majority of new games still have no native Linux support.
For example, Steam currently offers 28122 titles for sale; only 3280 of those titles have Linux support. In other words, only about 12% of all Steam titles work with Linux. That's also counting non-native software, like re-releases of DOS games which are actually emulated using DOSBox (or whatever).
Even indie games tend to not support Linux. Exceptional indie games like Kerbal Space Program and Don't Starve are, well, exceptions. For every such exception, it's trivial to find two or more Windows-only indie games. (Though, again, the trend is changing lately in favour of Linux; and that's a good thing.)
In general, new games are made for Windows first—and maybe Linux second, sometimes. It sucks, but it's true.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2017, @11:44PM
Counterpoint: Simulators. Not AAA but still need Windows :(
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2017, @04:44AM (3 children)
I'm not a gamer, so maybe I'm way off here.
It sounds like
1) you are stuck on a tiny number of games.
or
2) you haven't really investigated what is actually available.
(Roy Schestowitz's daily news digest at TechRights.org invariable has new Linux-compatible gaming items.)
This place has had a bunch of related items. [google.com]
In September of 2015, we noted
Steam Now Has 1500 Linux-Compatible Game Titles [soylentnews.org]
At that time, Steam was adding about 1 new Linux title a day.
The pace has accelerated since then.
I think you're blowing (prejudiced) smoke and haven't really made the slightest effort to become better informed in a long, long time.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2017, @07:50AM (2 children)
Games are similar to TV series and perhaps music in the sense that they are not really commodities. By this I mean to say that if you are currently obsessed with this one specific game, then any other game simply will not do.
We all know how incredibly frustrating it is when that show you like never becomes available on TV or streaming services you subscribed to. It is similar for games. If I decide I really want to play that specific game, then I need to invest in that platform if I don't already own it. This is also the same reason why console exclusives are a big thing for console developers and manufacturers, and an annoyance to many gamers.
If you limit yourself to PC games, then you never really have to worry about such situations because you know that any PC game worth its salt will be available for windows and possibly mac/linux. Note the 'possibly' there. As long as I cannot be absolutely confident that all the games I like will all run on linux, switching to linux is a no-go for me.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday March 20 2017, @12:27PM
Its even worse in that in public "computer gaming" or "video gaming" is exclusively the "FPS sequel of the month". Absolutely nothing but FPS is gaming and gaming is nothing but FPS.
Reality is weirder. I have no problems with dwarf fortress and heavily modified minecraft (playing the latest DW20 FTB pack right now on a private server so its 24x7). I haven't played DF in awhile but I get a good half hour of minecraft in per day as kind of a warm up. Works fine on windows, linux, freebsd anything with java pretty much. At least as of a year ago my SiL was still playing that online farm game which presumably requires a modern web browser and nothing else. There is some cheat-y DF add on for windows only that patches the binary game itself or something, obviously windows only, but I don't play with that.
Lately for real gaming I've broken out my board games as I sometimes do around this time of year and I've always been a board gamer war gamer type "grognard" or whatever and last weekend I broke out my copy of Andean Abyss from the archives and had a blast. That experience doesn't translate well to computer gaming because something more than 5 to 10 years old is going to have software issues with running yet be too recent to get away with virtualization and isn't popular enough to get special treatment (there's probably only, what, maybe 10K copies of AA out there?) I recall AA had balance issues and FARC always ends up crushing everyone and the cartel ends up crushed so its always the AUC (the good guys, as I see it) and the government vs FARC and the cartel just trying to make a buck here and there. And the dynamics of the game are strained because when AUC strikes, they smash FARC but lower govt support so its a balancing act. COIN games always end up kinda metastable for like 3 hours and then someone gets lucky and its over. Whatever anyway my large card table at 600+ professionally printed DPI means its graphics are better than any monitor under 5 feet and sixty thousand pixels across anyway, so I'm not likely to ditch my paper games and go online anytime soon. There's just something epic about setting up a full sheet of plywood on some sawhorses and playing a game like steel wolves for a long weekend, perhaps. You can enjoy both freebsd and gaming quite separately, in fact they're almost better experienced separately, is kind of my main point. I'm debating breaking out Caverna next weekend. Or play powergrid, perhaps. There's no point in having kids if you can't force them to be crewmen when you're playing space cadets dice duel, now that is an interesting party type game.
I will occasionally boot my copy of windows just to play steam games like lunar lander or spintyres. spintyres is like the second hour of that old strange 70s movie sorcerer which I assure you is not about DnD. Now I feel like shutting all this computer stuff off and watching Sorcerer today instead of stacking billable hours. Sorcerer is a strange movie thanks to the Overton window it was kinda blue pilled in the 70s and its extreme red pilled by 2010s standards, but I suppose many movies are like that. Star wars series is kinda like that, star wars has always been racist, look at how the white male is treated in the original movie where all the good guys are white males vs more recent where all the bad guys are exclusively white males like every other hollywood production.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday March 21 2017, @04:14PM
Those arguments are exactly why I gave up on Windows for gaming -- it doesn't run any of the games I want to run anymore. You CAN'T guarantee that any PC game will run on Windows -- at least not a modern version of it. I started noticing that particular issue back in the days of XP, and it's only gotten worse. I can either build a separate gaming rig with multiple obsolete versions of Windows and kept physically isolated from my network...which sounds like a HUGE pain in the ass...or I can just run Linux and use wine. Easy choice.
And when my friend told me about a great prerelease game earlier this year that I wanted to try? There was a native Linux version (Factorio). When I randomly stumbled across some YouTube videos of a game I couldn't wait to try? There was a native Linux version (Cities Skylines). Now try getting Command and Conquer to run on even Windows XP, let alone 7 or 10. It's been 15 years since you could play that particular game on Windows -- even though it was released for Windows. It runs perfectly on Linux, even though there is no Linux release. Granted, I don't do a TON of gaming, but it's been YEARS since I wanted to play a game that couldn't run on Linux, but only a few months since I last played a game that can't run on Windows.
So I don't necessarily doubt that Windows is better for some of the games that you would like to play, but it is no longer the case that Windows is ALWAYS better for gaming. Windows is better for some subsets of games. Linux is better for others. And Linux has made a hell of a lot of progress even in just the past year.
(Score: 2) by stormreaver on Monday March 20 2017, @11:52AM
Linux game coverage sucks compared to the same for Windows, no doubt about it. But that's why I have 2 PS/3's in my house. The gaming fix is easily handled.
Linux is awesome, and Windows is terrible, for everything else, though. Linux is especially awesome, and Windows is especially bad, for preserving my freedom.
Freedom ranks higher than gaming, and I've been playing video games since Pong was a smash hit in retail stores.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2017, @12:39PM
Is that the same windows 8 and 10 that cripples DirectX 9 games VRAM usage you are talking about?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Nerdfest on Monday March 20 2017, @02:01AM (10 children)
I still have a soft spot for Windows Vista. It's the release that pushed me to be a full-time Linux user.
I think the final push was catching their desktop search utility sending anything that looked like a URL back to Microsoft.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2017, @03:43AM
Vista wasn't bad after the second Service Pack.
I first tried it in early 2006 and it made my laptop slow to a crawl. Completely unusable, even for simple tasks like file copies. By 2010, Vista had improved to be a somewhat decent Operating System, at least as stable as Windows 7.
I used Vista until I got a free (legit) copy of 7 back in 2013. Looking back, it's easy to see that 7 was the final product and Vista was just released to get out of development hell.
I remember all the hype for Longhorn, which ended up being Vista. New Aero effects, new security subsystem, improved stability, new BeOS-style WinFS filesystem. I think Microsoft really tried to do too much and just shipped what they had after five years to get _something_ out the door. It was a mess at first, and I know a lot of people who wouldn't otherwise have tried, switched to Ubuntu for a bit.
What Vista really showed was how disorganized and bureaucratic Microsoft had become. Nothing they've done in the past fifteen years has made me think otherwise, or made me at least think, "Microsoft might actually be recovering." 7 was a decent product, but not really exciting when framed as what Vista was supposed to be. MSFT can not innovate, and they can barely even respond to market trends. Microsoft is directionless and only riding on their legacy of not fucking up Office and Active Directory too terribly. That, and they're in everybody's 401k portfolio over the age of 40. Give those guys another two decades to retire, and they will ride off into the sunset taking Microsoft with them.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Monday March 20 2017, @09:30AM (4 children)
I think the final push was catching their desktop search utility sending anything that looked like a URL back to Microsoft.
And it's only worsened with Windows 10...
What surprised me was when Ubuntu pulled the same bullshit with Amazon.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Monday March 20 2017, @09:50AM (1 child)
Yep. At least they fixed it eventually and didn't actively fight disabling it. Their mistake was defaulting it to "on".
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Monday March 20 2017, @01:30PM
Agreed. The Tyranny of the Default [pagefair.com] in action.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2017, @01:31PM (1 child)
However unlike Windows, with Linux you have the option to just use another distribution, without completely changing the OS.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Tuesday March 21 2017, @09:01AM
Yes, of course. Still seriously disappointing of Canonical to try it though.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday March 20 2017, @09:51PM (3 children)
Vista wasn't so bad - a lot like ME, if you just took a couple of hours to scour the internet and find a "how to make your Windows Vista/ME work just like XP/98" guide, you could type all those configurations in by hand (mostly registry settings) and then your newly crippled computer would have 97.44% of the comforts of the old OS, plus one or two nifty new features that - well, weren't really that great, but - could be called actual improvements/advancements.
Or, in those days, you could get Linux and spend twice as long trying to get functional drivers working for your hardware - things like the sound output, printer, advanced graphic display, mice and keyboards mostly "just worked" in Linux, but not much else.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Monday March 20 2017, @10:48PM (2 children)
I must have llucked out. I've only every had pronlem with one computer aout of 18 so far. It was an RTLink wireless crd that I neede to manually rebuild a driver for. Still worked, but very inconvenient, especially for a newb. In general, a better hardware support record than I've had with Windows, and this is with mostly *laptops*.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday March 21 2017, @03:02AM (1 child)
Ubuntu, since roughly 12.04, has been a good experience for most things. Still a tiny bit wonky on the sound, medium wonky on the OpenGL - but improving. All in all, starting to surpass Windows in terms of ease of installation and use, and Debian package management beats the hell out of installing software for Windows.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2017, @05:03AM
You hit a sore point with me. I don't have a lot of experience with Debian, but my long experience with Fedora/Redhat/CentOS makes me scream with respect to package management.
Biggest issue is when I need a newer version of a program than is supported in the repositories. Just tonight I needed "sar" 10.1.5 on a Redhat 6 box where the latest version in the repo is 9.x.x. I got lucky and was able to build out from source, but many times that is not even an option because of library dependencies.
With windows I can almost always install the latest software without doing a full OS upgrade. I run Fedora 20 on a home box and lots of newer versions of packages can no longer be installed. Upgrading to Fedora 25 will take at least a weekend and probably longer. Meh to Linux package management.
(Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Monday March 20 2017, @02:19AM
About 10 years too late, to be precise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by pkrasimirov on Monday March 20 2017, @08:26PM
> Microsoft Kills Windows
So far so good.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2017, @02:34PM
No credibility, no smooth operation, no respect, nada.