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Microsoft ends support for Windows XP and Office 2003

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Re: Microsoft ends support for Windows XP and Office 2003

#61

Post by jmnicolas »

Maakuth wrote: post #43
jmnicolas wrote: post #24

Where I work we still have business specific apps that run only on XP and our suppliers have no plan on upgrading them (unless we fund the entire project, which they will happily resell full price to over companies). This is a clear example of what the lack of competition does

What you should do is to encapsulate these apps to virtual machines with reduced-credential users, tight firewall settings, non-essential services disabled, etc. If possible, create a separate virtual storage medium for the application data and snapshot the operating system & app virtual disk so that any changes to it will not persist.

This is what I have been doing. The users have a hard time understanding what a VM is. It's a bit magical for them.

And I can't make Vm-Ware Player work with a scanner ...

Re: Microsoft ends support for Windows XP and Office 2003

#62

Post by jmnicolas »

elnate wrote: post #26
jmnicolas wrote: post #24

Where I work we still have business specific apps that run only on XP and our suppliers have no plan on upgrading them (unless we fund the entire project, which they will happily resell full price to over companies). This is a clear example of what the lack of competition does

What makes them specific to XP instead of just Windows?

I'm not sure, but on one app we have errors at install and on the other certain functionalities don't work as they should.

Now I wouldn't be able to tell you what are the incriminated part of Windows.

There's even an app that is written in dotnet and that is not Win 7 compatible. Can you believe it ???

Re: Microsoft ends support for Windows XP and Office 2003

#63

Post by CodeCube »

jmnicolas wrote: post #60
teh_klev wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As in, your supplier lacks any competition in their line of business sector? Or is this a claim that MS are to be found wanting because you're locked into your app supplier?

I was speaking about the suppliers : they almost have a monopoly and can do as they want with their customers. This is so bad that one of them shipped us a software upgrade with a hard-coded ip address. Next time the ip change they will have to recompile ...

/barf

That reminded me of a company I worked at. We were moving to a new datacenter, and the job of auditing and moving all of the scheduled tasks fell to me. A good 75% of the scheduled tasks were .exes for which we did not have the source code; and they all had connection strings hardcoded.

Thankfully, they were built in .NET, so I was able to decompile them, move the hardcoded stuff to .config files, and get it moved. But boy did that make me mad at the institutionalized laziness and sloppiness.

Re: Microsoft ends support for Windows XP and Office 2003

#64

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

FollowSteph3 wrote: post #51
jenscow wrote: post #17

While I don't blame Microsoft for ending support (they have been very accomodating already), but I find it strange of them to leave so many users stranded. Especially now there's several alternatives to Windows, all requiring a similar learning curve and migration pains to that of moving to Windows 7 or 8. Personally, when people have asked me about it I usually point them to Linux Mint, using their existing computer…

Most people don't realize it but Apple does this all the time. Goos luck running most 5+ year old mac on the latest Mac OS X ;)

OS X Mavericks today runs on some machines that are 7 years old. True, that's still not great, but better than you claimed.

Re: Microsoft ends support for Windows XP and Office 2003

#65

Post by andygates »

dorward wrote: post #39
jurre wrote: post #6

Except for our government who are paying MS an exorbitant amount of money to keep support up... http://www.zdnet.com/dutch-government-pays-millions-to-exten...

You are not alone. The UK government is doing something similar. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/07/uk-governm...

That works out at about £13,000 for our site, which is £16 per XP box. Our renewal program - like many big public-sector ones - is contingent on budget, manpower, and horrible crufty software for which there is no more modern compatible alternative or update. Or where the update is just broken (gee thanks), so we have to wait out vendors' promises versus a ticking clock.

Re: Microsoft ends support for Windows XP and Office 2003

#67

Post by chris_wot »

Tarks wrote: post #25
k-mcgrady wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite shocked that they've struck a multimillion dollar deal to keep support UNTIL JANUARY! Is there a reason they couldn't just move their upgrade cycle up 9 months? Obviously they knew this was coming.

For the benefit of people that haven't had the dis/pleasure of working in a really big company, the large banks / govy places often have a ton of dependencies and at (least) one place I worked at had a custom tailored build of Windows with features they need. They're also heavily regulated and if they can't show evidence that they've done all the required audit checks to ensure they're in line then the repercussions…

It's worse in government. I knew a very important Australian government department that used four levels of test for a service management system.

Re: Microsoft ends support for Windows XP and Office 2003

#68

Post by Bahamut »

k-mcgrady wrote: post #12
jurre wrote: post #6

Except for our government who are paying MS an exorbitant amount of money to keep support up... http://www.zdnet.com/dutch-government-pays-millions-to-exten...

Quite shocked that they've struck a multimillion dollar deal to keep support UNTIL JANUARY! Is there a reason they couldn't just move their upgrade cycle up 9 months? Obviously they knew this was coming.

It's not just about upgrading the OS - it's also about upgrading the software built for that OS, which in some cases requires a complete rebuild.

Re: Microsoft ends support for Windows XP and Office 2003

#69

Post by andygates »

jmnicolas wrote: post #24

Where I work we still have business specific apps that run only on XP and our suppliers have no plan on upgrading them (unless we fund the entire project, which they will happily resell full price to over companies). This is a clear example of what the lack of competition does

Even if there was competition, it would only apply when buying new software - once you're belted in for the ride, people are loath to change.

The specialist software market seems so crappy, and so prone to throwing good money after bad, that I can understand that.

Re: Microsoft ends support for Windows XP and Office 2003

#70

Post by danielweber »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #53
gtirloni wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How open source will fix it for an organization that can't bother to move from a decade old operating system? In 10 years we'll reading about the UK govt having trouble moving away from Ubuntu LTS 14.04. They only have option b) if they won't to avoid this in the future. Open source or not.

Upgrading an OS OS is a lot cheaper than upgrading a proprietary one.

Yep, if they run into any issues, just post to the Ubuntu forums, and lazer420 will tell you how to fix it!
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