Is Windows XP the Watershed that we need?
I posted this at the , but wanted your opinions as well Does anyone here think that Windows XP will be the watershed I hope it is? Anyone with an old computer that can't support XP properly will hereby be considered Legacy.
I posted this at the [H], but wanted your opinions as well
"Does anyone here think that Windows XP will be the watershed I hope it is?
Anyone with an old computer that can't support XP properly will hereby be considered Legacy...and manufacturers can move on and provide those of us with "modern" machines better materials, more suited to our capabilities, rather than their forefathers'.
no more games meant to cater to people with a Cyrix 333 and a 4mb S3Virge DX. TNT2 or better, 16mb and up.
no more applications catering to the hopeless Win95 crowd with their struggling Packard Bell and Compaqs that still rely on edo and an infinite amount of a Technician's patience and aggravation.
I don't necessarily want to have this shoved down people's throats, but dammit, it's time that we moved on and turned our backs on systems that are top of the line for 6 years ago. We need a watershed event to speed us along.
ISA is dead. a very few boards still allow it, but no new ones(DDR-generation) are coming with it.
I believe Mac did it with their G series...much to the chagrin of legacy users, and delight of others.
If legacy devices are still needed, for some inane reason, leave them with an OS more suited to them (Win98SE). Let them stay there and not be upgraded or updated or whatever. Let them sit in their corners and fold genomes or whatever while they're not being used.
Hook them up to the internet and use them as printservers or file servers or whatever.
If you insist on using your Pentium2 450 or AMD K6-2 400 with 64mb of RAM, spend the lousy 20 bucks and upgrade yourself to 192 or more!
50 bucks will get you a GF2MX 200 w/ TV out. Get rid of your ATI RagePro Turbo AGP(I admit, I have one).
have an 8gb hdd? a mere 50 bucks can get you 20GB more!
Something needs to be done.
id is doing their Doom3 in such a way that if you have a TNT2, you can basically forget it, and the GF3 will have a hard time running it at what are considered "minimum" fps by today's avid gamers.
Quake 3, UT, and especially Tribes 2 were good at pressing the standards. Some of us upgraded(I upgraded to a GeForce256 because of Quake 3, and Tribes 2 made me upgrade to a GF2 GTS)
But what has done this with Operating Systems?
nothing really.
You just got a bloated WinME that did nothing worthwhile over Win98 other than dumbed the OS down for the idiots who couldn't handle Win2K(and as for gamers--most of them opted for Win98SE over WinME....very few of you out there willingly use-and endorse-WinMe over Win98Se in games. And hte rest of you have moved on to Win2k or XP.) for one reason or another.
Win2k was a watershed for NT4 systems. no longer could a Pentium 100 do the trick. while this was bad for some companies who didn't want to upgrade, that was their choice.
to get the nice new features that 2k offered, they had to get better systems.
but XP isn't just in a corporate environment.
They have their eyes set on the consumer market as well.
They're finally moving people over to the far more stable NT kernel, and as long as shitty ****ing companies such as Compaq and HP don't screw the kernel over with their bloatware, I think MS could do really well with the newfound stability alone that most consumers didn't know their computers had.
I've not seen an unexpected blue screen on my machines with NT kernels in 9 months.
With this change, can MS officially label the 9x core as "legacy" the way WinMe did to MSDOS, and provide it with fixes, but not new developments? ...Instead investing it's time and money and research on XP, .net, and other endeavours that would help the consumer in what could potentially be a "new" computing world and opportunities for the consumer that the NT kernel provides?"
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?threadid=227065&highlight=watershed
"Does anyone here think that Windows XP will be the watershed I hope it is?
Anyone with an old computer that can't support XP properly will hereby be considered Legacy...and manufacturers can move on and provide those of us with "modern" machines better materials, more suited to our capabilities, rather than their forefathers'.
no more games meant to cater to people with a Cyrix 333 and a 4mb S3Virge DX. TNT2 or better, 16mb and up.
no more applications catering to the hopeless Win95 crowd with their struggling Packard Bell and Compaqs that still rely on edo and an infinite amount of a Technician's patience and aggravation.
I don't necessarily want to have this shoved down people's throats, but dammit, it's time that we moved on and turned our backs on systems that are top of the line for 6 years ago. We need a watershed event to speed us along.
ISA is dead. a very few boards still allow it, but no new ones(DDR-generation) are coming with it.
I believe Mac did it with their G series...much to the chagrin of legacy users, and delight of others.
If legacy devices are still needed, for some inane reason, leave them with an OS more suited to them (Win98SE). Let them stay there and not be upgraded or updated or whatever. Let them sit in their corners and fold genomes or whatever while they're not being used.
Hook them up to the internet and use them as printservers or file servers or whatever.
If you insist on using your Pentium2 450 or AMD K6-2 400 with 64mb of RAM, spend the lousy 20 bucks and upgrade yourself to 192 or more!
50 bucks will get you a GF2MX 200 w/ TV out. Get rid of your ATI RagePro Turbo AGP(I admit, I have one).
have an 8gb hdd? a mere 50 bucks can get you 20GB more!
Something needs to be done.
id is doing their Doom3 in such a way that if you have a TNT2, you can basically forget it, and the GF3 will have a hard time running it at what are considered "minimum" fps by today's avid gamers.
Quake 3, UT, and especially Tribes 2 were good at pressing the standards. Some of us upgraded(I upgraded to a GeForce256 because of Quake 3, and Tribes 2 made me upgrade to a GF2 GTS)
But what has done this with Operating Systems?
nothing really.
You just got a bloated WinME that did nothing worthwhile over Win98 other than dumbed the OS down for the idiots who couldn't handle Win2K(and as for gamers--most of them opted for Win98SE over WinME....very few of you out there willingly use-and endorse-WinMe over Win98Se in games. And hte rest of you have moved on to Win2k or XP.) for one reason or another.
Win2k was a watershed for NT4 systems. no longer could a Pentium 100 do the trick. while this was bad for some companies who didn't want to upgrade, that was their choice.
to get the nice new features that 2k offered, they had to get better systems.
but XP isn't just in a corporate environment.
They have their eyes set on the consumer market as well.
They're finally moving people over to the far more stable NT kernel, and as long as shitty ****ing companies such as Compaq and HP don't screw the kernel over with their bloatware, I think MS could do really well with the newfound stability alone that most consumers didn't know their computers had.
I've not seen an unexpected blue screen on my machines with NT kernels in 9 months.
With this change, can MS officially label the 9x core as "legacy" the way WinMe did to MSDOS, and provide it with fixes, but not new developments? ...Instead investing it's time and money and research on XP, .net, and other endeavours that would help the consumer in what could potentially be a "new" computing world and opportunities for the consumer that the NT kernel provides?"
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?threadid=227065&highlight=watershed
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Responses to this topic
It's possible, but I don't think XP itself will be the driving force behind this. It will just open the door for it. Consumers don't care about the OS. If it does what it is supposed to they ignore it. If it has a problem they b!tch at it. Otherwise, that's about it. What they are interested in is what the computer can do for them. So Windows XP's support for things like digital photography and IEEE 1394 will bring about several new products and advancements in existing products. These products, of course, won't run on older hardware. This will provide incentive to purchase new hardware. Not many consumers, or businesses, purchase new hardware just because a new OS has been released. But you'll see Grandma run off to the nearest Best Buy and purchase a new Compaq computer if it means she can see the grandkids through video conferencing whenever she wants to.
Wanna get rid of legacy? Then get rid of Parallel/Serial/PS2 ports, and you will have my attention. MS will find a hard sell with WinXP, and they know. Sure, it's faster than Win9x if you compare them to each other on a fairly strong box (P3-class and up?), but the thing you have to remember is that Win9x is PAID FOR by those users. Win95 made a huge splash at first, and so did Win98 (because most consumers still had the non-rev/rev "A" version of the OS and wanted "out" badly!) in its debut. I just don't see that happening with XP for a while. Couple that with the incessant need by MS to sell their stupid "Plus" add-on (add-on my a$$, should be included since they included so much other $hit) and nobody will bother with it. Over time, people will see it on new computers and may decide to upgrade later (upgrade as in buy another PC more than likely) and the slow death of "legacy" apps will begin. So in short, don't hold your breath.
The problem is that most people own a box that is around 400mHZ or so. if you want to talk about legacy how about floppy drives. I know i run out to CompUSA every week to pick up a 50 pack of floppies. XP will not make the splash M$ hopes it to be, most people are happy with their old boxes because they do nothing more than play solitaire, surf the net and write a few word documents. The era of the PC being the end all to everything and integrating everything into it is over. You see things like play stations coming out with internet capabilities, and DVD drives. So we are getting more into an era of Applicances that do the same task as what PCs are used for. Yes you are still going to get people that prefer what a PC will do as compared to an play station or something of that nature, but your average person uses a computer for nothing more than a glorified typewritter because they are not saavy enough to realise that the PC can be used as a platform for many things. So the only people that are going to still use PCs in the home in the next few years are nerds and PC gamers. Otherwise people are going to get something like the X-box for their kid and use that to play games, then they will get Stereo with Mp3 capabilities to play music, or a home DVD player. The age where the PC is being used for everything is just not feasable.
