Did Microsoft make Windows XP too good?
Most people know me as a big Mac fan, but I was one of the people that stood in line at my local CompUSA in November of 2001 at midnight for Windows XP. At the time I was a big PC gamer, and I was getting a little tired of the Windows 95/98/ME crashes, but wanted the stability of Windows 2000, which a lot of my games wouldn’t play on.
I’ve had a pretty happy relationship with Windows XP, unlike the constant bluescreening from the Windows 9x family. In the beginning, there were some driver issues that had to be banged out with XP, but after a few months, it because quite stable and I can’t even remember the last time I saw a BSOD from it.
I also truly loved how you could customize it. I was a huge Object Desktop user, using everything I could to give XP a unique look. There was some heavy use of XP Customization on the neowin.net boards years ago. My favorite was creating icons for Y’z Dock which was a direct ripoff of the Mac OS X dock.
XP had its issues of burying certain features deep into control panels and advanced settings, but once you learned where they all were, you could make XP do what you wanted it to do.
When Vista was announced, I really didn’t care much. XP worked, and other than DirectX 10 which I didn’t really need, it offered nothing to me to want me to pay the ridiculous upgrade price for very little which I actually needed. Over time I found that Vista itself was plagued with problems and I felt I made the right decision to stay away from it.
Eight years later, I still use XP every day at work, and at home on my gaming rig. There isn’t anything that doesn’t run on it, and I really don’t feel that it’s old or antiquated, whereas the difference between System 6 and System 7 on the Mac were like night and day. System 7 made it obvious that it was light years ahead of its predecessor both under the hood and the body, but I don’t see that with Windows 7.
I played with Windows 7 and it’s cool and shiny, but I don’t get that feel that I need to have it like I did when System 7 came out for the Mac in 1991. When you install a new OS on any platform, the first thing I worry about is how much time it’s going to take before the drivers work properly, the games and apps are patched, and I don’t have to worry about how to jump through hoops to get something to work right. Currently, I see people using Windows 7 having driver problems which I know would drive me batty.
At the same time, I know that XP’s life is limited. Microsoft is going to drop support for it in 2014 which is a good five years away, but are app and gaming developers still sticking with XP? In my company they are. On gaming boxes you still see XP as a supported platform. I’m looking at the upgrade price at Amazon.com for the Windows 7 Professional version and I’m wondering if the $100 is worth it. Will I get eight years out of Windows 7? What technology’s coming to PCs that Microsoft could exploit in order to get people to pay for Windows 8 when it comes out? I think about how I upgrade Mac OS every two or three years for $129 without batting an eyelash, but now Mac OS X 10.6 has a $29 upgrade price, which makes me ponder the Windows 7 price even more.
In the end, I belive that upgrading after eight years probably isn’t a bad idea. I think I’ve squeezed enough blood from the XP stone that paying $99 isn’t going to bite me in the ass. So here, I go…
*click*
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Kitch
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sarama
