Or if you don't want two pc's or dual boot you can always run one OS under with virtualbox or vmware player or any number of other virtualization tools. I suggest using Linux as a host as the performance is much faster. I used to run XP under Linux on my old laptop and when I flipped to full screen no one could tell the difference. I've had up to 4 servers running at one time under a Linux host to do a lab test.
Any time I've had to use MSOffice I would just use the free viewers in a virtual XP session to make sure it looked good.

It's time for XP to die. That OS was released in 2001, and it is now 2014. Name one other OS that made it that long? That had three Service Packs to it's history?

In my opinion, a PC's (or laptops) life is somewhere between 3 - 5 years depending on how top of the food chain you were when you purchased it.

As far as ATM's running embedded versions, etc.. I am not going to lose one minute of sleep over it. Those systems access and security is well known. Honestly, it's easier for a crook to roll in a completely counterfeit machine to collect account numbers and pins.

You would be surprised at what Windows 7 will run on, but it's generally hardware memory limitations where you get into trouble. 3GB's of ram is pretty much the minimum for a Windows 7 machine. That's about 25% less than what I think Vista needed prior to it's Service Packs.

I think 80% of the complains about Windows 8 is just noise. It's different. They are not going back, but their biggest mistake was trying to put a Tablet interface on a desktop computer. Make the OS "smart" enough to see that there's a keyboard and mouse hooked up, dual monitors.. etc.. and boot straight to the desktop and skip the tiles.

If there's a touch screen, no keyboard, boot to the tiles, and give the end user a choice to change it anyway they want.

Underneath, Windows 8 is a sound OS. They just missed some details.

Rod

Distributing an OS such as Windows 8, that could not perform a basic function such as configuring a POP email account that Windows 98SE was able to do was also another major short coming. The NSA influence was clearly seen with regard to the email provision in Windows 8 having to use their corporate proxy servers. The Simon Says Toy GUI is appalling being completely unintuitive to the principles of a Windows OS established by XeroxPARC research in the late 1970s.

If Windows 8 had booted to a C:\Simon_Says> Desktop - Y | Tablet - CTRL_ALT_DELETE

They may have been on to a winner..

Various flavors of Unix .



I've spent some time in that space, and I would very much be losing sleep over embedded XP if I worked for a bank that had it running on their ATMs. Jackpotting an ATM running embedded XP looks pretty easy if you get access to the network it's on. Yes, normally attackers shouldn't be able to get on those networks, but relying upon that without addressing the ATM's vulnerabilities is a recipe for failure.



Usability is a crucial component of a desktop operating system. When you change the paradigm, hobbyists and professionals will figure it out if they choose to. Run of the mill end-users will have a very hard time doing so, and will choose not to if they have any option. I spend my work time in enterprise IT environments and I have not seen a single Windows 8 PC on an end-user's desk. Home users have been avoiding it in droves. This is not just noise.

Name one other OS that even needs service packs in the first place. A Windows "service pack" is when you get so many patches to the OS that nobody can keep track of them all, so they have to bundle them together by the thousands and release them together as a single package. These gigantic patch bundles change the underlying OS to a massive degree. What you have is effectively a new OS.

I'm running Slackware which was first released in 1993
A new version comes maybe every year and a half.

Most any OS gets regular fixes, Microsoft's mistake was to add new features and change things in a fix pack. One of the Windows 2003 service packs came with a new feature called TCPChimney which caused all kinds of network issues which of course didn't surface in dev or UAT/performance test environments and took us a while to find and then disable across the rest of the servers. I'm amazed at the amount of $ corporate America looses to crap like that.

As far as moving off of Windows, there was an initial learning curve but its no more than the learning curve moving to a new version of Windows or moving to a mac. Once you get past that Linux is no big deal. I've gained back so many hours per week/month not having to do update/reboot/fix Windows, update the AV and antispyware, etc. The total cost of ownership is way lower.

I can't remember the last time I rebooted. And I do keep up to date. I type slackpkg update and go back to the forum I was on and check back later to see if its done.

Windows 8. Spooky familiarity to folks of a certain generation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yF0ZUXclW8Y




LOL. Cause your TCP/IP stack will go up in flames and bring down your Network!

Of course much of the MS Windows OS programming was actually done on Mac Computers!

Basically thats what happened. Microsoft somewhat acknowledged it http://support.microsoft.com/kb/945977

They basically implemented a new feature in SP2 and enabled it by default weather your hardware supported it or not and it affected many servers, not just the few specifics they list here.

BTW for those who never had an issue with MSOffice. I finished a spreadsheet in Excel 2010 and saved it, hibernated my work laptop, went home and resumed and connected to the vpn and dialed into a late meeting and Excel could not find my spreadsheet. A search finds the shortcut in the recent documents to it but it didn't exist. So I looked unprepared for my meeting and and to do my work again afterward.

I'll probably skip 8 altogether. It's not all that long til its successor will out and I'm very happy with 7.

Looks like 7 will be available as an OEM install for a while yet. The corporate crowd has spoken (incl. thumb on nose, giant raspberry, and various obscene gestures). http://arstechnica.com/information-techn...usiness-buyers/

Those of us who are computer savvy will find our way through this transition. I do worry about people who don't understand the implications. If they do critical stuff like banking online, that's blood in the water. No doubt the sharks are circling.