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from the can't-resist-that-minty-freshness dept.
prospectacle writes:
How to best replace Windows XP has become interesting to a much wider group of people, due to the end of official support for the product. (a previous story mentioned an Indian state government that urged its departments to use India's home-grown linux distro "BOSS Linux").
Some people may be using XP because it came with their computer and they never gave it a second thought, but there are probably plenty of others who don't want to spend the money, don't like the look of Windows 8, have older hardware, or are just used to the XP interface.
To these people, ZDNet humbly offers Linux Mint as a suggestion to replace XP.
They provide fairly compelling arguments to their target audience like:
- You can make it look almost exactly like XP
- It's free
- You can boot the live CD to try before you "buy".
- Decent, free alternatives exist for email, office, book-keeping and web-browsing.
- Virtually no need for any anti-virus for home users.
- Installation is quite easy these days.
- Works on fairly modest hardwar
Ending free support for a 12 year old product seems like a sensible policy for a for-profit entity like microsoft. In the past they've been able to count on people upgrading from old microsoft products to new microsoft products, and so any measure that would encourage (or pressure) people to upgrade would increase their sales.
Seems like a winning formula.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday March 31 2014, @02:58PM
You OBVIOUSLY didn't upgrade XPSP2 to XPSP3 on an AMD CPU in it's first release. Upgrading Win98SE to WinME wasn't a cakewalk either. I have read other horror stories as well - and no professional sysadmin fearlessly leaps into the task of upgrading his company's computers. I think that nearly everyone who reads a slash site agrees that fools run where angels fear to tread when it comes to updates, on any platform.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 01 2014, @12:06AM
Win98SE to WinME wasn't a cakewalk either
hairyfeet, who has posted to this thread, has repeatedly identified the giant problem there:
MICROS~1 decided to mix device driver types. [google.com][1]
If you (and your whitebox vendor) choose a single type and stick with that, you're OK; mix them and you were screwed.
[1] If accessing /. pages these days, I recommend using the fuckbeta.slashdot.org subdomain to send a message to Dice Holdings. /. page; be sure to append &strip=1 to the URL of the Cache and /. gets no pagehits.
Even better, you can view Google's Cache of a
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by etherscythe on Tuesday April 01 2014, @12:08AM
Thank you, Microsoft, for job security.
I remember with a bug with Windows Vista around the SP1 release, where the NTFS journal would fill up and the system would blue screen. And not just the installed OS - any Vista that didn't get the hotfix would blue screen with this volume attached, including the installation disk.
The only solution, until the hotfix came out, was to launch a Linux live CD and delete the journal metafile, or format the whole drive. I still laugh at the irony of it sometimes.
"Fake News: anything reported outside of my own personally chosen echo chamber"