Comments

1. Titan602

   
   Posted on: January 02, 2007 at 1:56PM  

   Ha! Lol. Have you got one saying this HOME is XP-free?
2. Hanneman

   
   Posted on: January 02, 2007 at 4:12PM  

   Cool... Also great as wallpaper!
3. Jason

   
   Posted on: January 02, 2007 at 8:21PM  

   Nice!  And I would like another that says "32bit-free"  :)
4. Randy Scholes

   
   Posted on: January 03, 2007 at 12:36AM  

   I'm going to use this as my wallpaper at work... :P
5. newscientist2000

   
   Posted on: January 03, 2007 at 2:32AM  

   Funny poster, although it kinda makes me think about WGA deactivating my legit copy of Windows XP, but thats probably just me being paranoid!

   I guess in a few years well have another poster that says "Hasta La Vista, BABY!" staring the Governator!
6. Gabriel

   
   Posted on: January 03, 2007 at 10:20AM  

   My XPired Office XP will be replaced by OpenOffice.
7. Randy Scholes

   
   Posted on: January 03, 2007 at 11:07AM  

   Gabriel hell with OpenOffice... go for office 2007... It's sweet as hell
8. Gabriel

   
   Posted on: January 03, 2007 at 6:50PM  

   Sn4k3, I've been using Office 2007 for months now. It is sweet and the Teacher/Student edition price is even sweeter, but Microsoft's software activation schemes make me nervous. I need Windows so I'll have to put up with its product activation nonsense, but I don't need Office, even at such a great price.

   I'll give you a good example of why Microsoft no longer inspires confidence: I recently purchased (at Newegg) a licence to Windows XP MCE OEM with free upgrade to Vista Home Premium for a PC I built. When I attempted to sign up for the upgrade, the online system rejected my request, claiming that my Vista upgrade redemption number was already in use. I e-mailed to request that this error be corrected. The autoresponder wrote back that I would receive a response within 24 hours. Five days later they replied, requesting that I provide my CD key from the XP COA. I supplied the number. This was the week before Christmas. I have received no reply, no acknowledgement, no nothing. At this point I'm not sure if I'll receive the upgrade or not and I'm just tired of the whole thing. I lack the energy to fight back. So I'm not switching to Vista out of principle and moving away from Microsoft as fast as I can. I'm not a masochist.
9. Xepol

   
   Posted on: January 04, 2007 at 9:18AM  

   With the experiences I have had to date with Vista, I just don't see this as realisitic under any conditions.

   Support for hardware is attrocious!  Now perhaps this isn't MS's fault exactly, but MS shoulders a portion of the blame here.

   A few points in case :

   Older video card support STINKS.  My XP box runs (active tense) a radeon 9800 AiW and an old 8mb ATI pci card for dual display support.  I tried this under Vista and nothing could convince it to use the PCI card.  All it needed to do was use a standard vga driver for it, but nope, no such luck.  So out I went to blow 200$ on a new AGP dual head card (which is pretty hard to find)

   Next case :

   I have a p4c800-e delux mb, with has the Promise 378 controller on board for extra SATA.  Is it supported?  Nope. NOTHING.  Updates has nothing, Promise has nothing on their site and their support won't even answer questions about vista availability.  Research seems to show that no-one has ever successfully gotten an vista driver for onboard 378 Promise controller , but suggestions are to use the XP drivers.  That works, sort of.

   I also have a Promise SATA300 TX4 PCI control for SATA 2 support.  It does have drivers (either from the rtm distro or updates, I am not sure), but once you install the Promise 378 drivers AND the SATA300 TX4 drivers, your system dies.

   And I mean completely.  It does not boot, it does not even REMOTELY try to boot while a SATA drive is plugged into EITHER controller.  No boot screen, no drives whiring -> NOTHING.  Unplug the drives, get the system to boot, force it to install the drivers for the SATA300 first and then the 378 (not easy to do, it detects them in the opposite order and insists on installing them in that order and then rebooting, so you have to fight it) - if you manage that then you can reboot 2 or 3 times before it dies again.

   This is unbelievably horrible.  I just can't imagine what people were thinking.  The 378 chipset is hardly new, and hardly old either - it is a very common addon chipset to recent motherboards to get past the sata port limiation on 865/875 chipsets.  The people MS most wants to pay for Ulitmate are the most likely people to use these extra controllers.

   Bear in mind that I tried to update an fully functional, -STABLE- XP system and failed horribly with Vista.

   I suspect that if I bought a brand new system today with all new bleeding edge hardware that it would probably work passingly well (unless it involves a Promise controller, then all bets are off) but it just doesn't make sense to spend a thousand or more dollars to justify a 2 or 3 hundred dollar OS upgrade expense.  I was willing to update the video card to something more recent because it was less than 200$ and could also improve XP, but seriously, that is my limit.

   After Vista's official release on the 31, I will try to reinstall the system.  WHEN (not if, because I have no faith here) it fails, I will probably ignore Vista for at least 2 to 3 years, if not the entire version and wait to see the next version.

   So my machine will STAY XP.  And as I am a computer consultant, I will be encouraging anyone who asks to do the same.
10. Xepol

    
    Posted on: January 04, 2007 at 2:28PM  

    by "update a fully functional xp system" I mean that I installed Vista on the same hardware which worked flawlessly with XP, not that I tried to upgrade OS from XP to Vista.  

    I scratch installed Vista on a fresh HD so that I could just drop the the XP harddrive back in, in the event of a problem (wise choice as it turns out)