When do you think the XP crowd will finally move on?

Lysander

Lysander

Lysander

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And by this I don't mean people here necessarily, but people all over the world. The large silent majority who use XP and see no need to change.

Of course these people would never use Vista, that would have already happened. So do you think W7 will be the OS to get them all moving on, or maybe the one after that? The problem is that the majority of people I know who don't know that much about computers see no need to move on from XP. At all. For me it's a toss-up between W7 or even the OS after that, come about 2012 when 32bit OS's really will be phased out.

Mainstream support finishes in 2010 for XP with extended support finishing in 2014. However, I don't see this being a major contributing factor to people changing operating systems.
 
The vast majority will only use the latest operating system when they purchase a new PC.

The general populous do not, generally, purchase an operating system and upgrade/install it themselves.
 
All depends on how people use computers. Unless you care if you have the latest and greatest OS then people won't change, I mean why would they? My family all have XP laptops and will never change tbh as XP does everything they want.
 
I have both XP and Vista 64. Xp sits on my main rig, vista on the media centre one I put together.

I bought V64 to see what it was like and there's nothing in it that has convinced me of the need to lay out more ££££s to "upgrade" my main PC. Now, when support stops I'll be forced to move on I suppose. I've downloaded W7 and I like what I see. It all works very smoothly and there doesn't appear to be too high a performance hit compared to XP. Given that it is a beta I'd imagine this will completely disappear by go-live. It looks good and seems to be less in-you-face gimmicky than Vista is/was. However, XP is still doing everything W7 is and I've already paid for it, so I might delay the upgrade for a while yet.

I don't see why I should change (pay) OS, when the one I've got is perfectly serviceable. XP, works and works well for me. It runs all my apps just fine and most of my games faster than comparable Vista based machines. The main point though is that I've already got a good OS so why would I pay to use another one?
 
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For the average user out there there's no real compelling reason to move over to XP, for the large corporates in the main they'll only do so if they are due to refresh their hardware as there's no real advantage to moving over to Vista if the XP estate is running fine.

I'm working on project at the mo where we have around 5000 desktops and we've not even looked at the possibilities of moving over to Vista, I also helped out on another project last year which will have 10000+ desktops/laptops and they've rolled out on XP.
 
Lysander said:
I can't see that happening unless a Linux distro comes about which is identical to Windows in every respect.
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Viruses and all? :p

It depends on how the person uses the PC. If they don't game, a distro like Ubuntu would easily meet their needs, provided that all the hardware in the machine is fully supported. There are drop down menus with application names in plain english. How hard can it be?
 
IAmATeaf said:
For the average user out there there's no real compelling reason to move over to XP, for the large corporates in the main they'll only do so if they are due to refresh their hardware as there's no real advantage to moving over to Vista if the XP estate is running fine.
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Yep, corporations don't want to move OS because it is a royal pain in the backside and they want to get want to maximise utilisation of their current assets. Unless there is a compelling reason to upgrade - which there isn't.

But, I don't see how the situation is different for private users? Why would an "enthusiast" move to Vista from XP, except to play with a new OS. I have both (to play), I truely can't see any reason why I'd move exclusively to Vista and pay for the privilege.
 
eXor said:
How hard can it be?
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Harder than you'd think. I think of myself as pretty computer savvy but I gave up using Ubuntu for a few reasons.

Firstly, software installation. This is a huge pain in the arse. You can't always click on an executable file, you have to download something from Synaptic which demands something else which demands something else... and then you have to make changes in the kernel.

Secondly, drivers. A lot of companies don't really care as much about Linux users so they don't create drivers that work so well, if at all. I currently run a 1920x1200 monitor and I can't get my ATI driver to work properly for it. Nsys [can't remember what it's called - the program that locates and installs drivers for you] would only get the 8.3s for me which wouldn't scale further than 1600x1200. And you can't roll back to previous versions without more and more kernal changes. Can you really see the average home user going through all that?

The thing with Windows users if they just want to click things and for them to work. They don't want to type anything. They know nothing about code and kernals and any mention of such will have then running back to Windows. Until Linux makes everything work with a double-click or two, people won't move to it in the mainstream.
 
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we still use xp at the company i work for. We have missed out vista and more than likely move over to W7. We are only just rolling out Office 2007 this month. Due to the amount of software we use testing it will be a nightmare so it made sense waiting.
 
They will probably move on when people tell them that the latest version of windows isn't bad - let's be honest, a lot of people who are staying with XP because "vista sux" have never used it and are just basing their opinions on a few people who tried it on a 4 year old pc a week after it was launched.
 
Beerbaron said:
we still use xp at the company i work for. We have missed out vista and more than likely move over to W7. We are only just rolling out Office 2007 this month. Due to the amount of software we use testing it will be a nightmare so it made sense waiting.
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Ditto. I can't see any benefit from upgrading to Vista at our place. We've even delayed Office 2007 by quite a bit as a lot of our users will be confused by it.
 
Rhys said:
2014 is a long time away. I think Linux will have caught up in terms of hardware detection and also got better at being easy to use for "noobs"
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Linux is already doing well, everything including all the fancy buttons on my laptop keyboard "just work" in Linux mint and I find it very user friendly. Installing an application is as simple as opening the software website and clicking install on a program you like. Thats it!
 
Rhys said:
I think a lot of XP users should/will go to Linux when support finishes.
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Never going to happen. I have tried several variations of Linux and hated them. The average pc user will never get their heads around it. They just want a OS that works.

XP does everything you need a OS to do. There is no compelling reason to switch to anything else. All of my family and freinds are on XP. Some have tried Vista and then went back to XP. I did this myself as i did'nt like Vista either. I have two pc's and both run XP Pro although as i have just got a couple of decent DX10 games i stuck Vista on a spare hard drive and now dual boot on my gaming pc. I would never use it for day to day tasks though and it certainly won't be going near my general purpose/internet pc. When i installed Vista i checked task manager and found that there were 52 services running!! Why on earth does it need that many? Needless to say it is being trimmed down and at the moment i am down to 34 services which is still too many. You don't even need half the rubbish that runs.
 
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