Bye-bye Windows XP

Any hardcore readers of slashdot and other tech blogs will probably know this already, but it’s news to me.
Apparently, by the end of this month, Microsoft will no longer be shipping retail copies of Windows XP, and will be forbidding aftermarket OEMs from pre-installing it on their hardware. What does this mean?

It means that, unless you have your old XP discs still with you, the OS will be slowly phased out in the coming months (more or less, read the article for more details)

If you don’t have any XP discs or some sort of an imaged backup of the OS and are planning to buy or build a new rig or laptop after this month, you most likely will be forced to “upgrade” to the newer Windows Vista.

This wouldn’t such bad news had Vista been well designed and free of numerous security flaws, memory leaks, and a myriad of other issues. It’s bad enough that Microsoft is trying to gain a monopoly on the home/home office OS market by not offering a version of DX10 for XP (although considering the set lifespan of it’s operating systems it may not be completely malicious) but now it’s more or less forcing a shitty OS on it’s end users.

I’ve always used windows just because it’s what we always had, and I never had any problems with any version of the OS from 95 up to XP, but for the time being I’m seriously considering switching to Linux.

~ by pansquared on June 16, 2008.