Microsoft Announces Extended Availability of Windows XP Home for ULCPCs

one thing that's troubling about this is those conflicting dates: "mainstream technical support (of XP) will continue to be available until April 2009" "Windows XP Home Edition will be available on ULCPCs through either June 30, 2010 or until one year after Windows 7 ships, whichever comes last." so who handles support for devices with preinstalled copies of Windows XP once Microsoft cuts mainstream support? will OEM's continue supporting their preinstalled copies under the OEM license agreement from Microsoft, even though Microsoft themselves are pulling the free support plug? i guess the question should be, why would OEM's support an operating system when the lack mainstream support from the vendor would allow them to wash their hands of their contractual obligations? i dunno about this, but it's a fairly questionable action, if only to oversaturate the market with more ultra-budget Walmart junk. i'd rather be looking at the developing sub-$1000 Windows Vista UMPC models. the Centrino Atom looks interesting, if not somewhat overpromising. Windows Media Center would work as well for mobile entertainment as it does on a bigscreen HDTV, although whether or not the Atom can deliver the same kind of quality one would expect from a half-decent media PC is still up in the air. the previous A1x0 series processors definitely couldn't handle H.264, and there were even reports that VP6 video (the codec that Flash 8 video uses on sites like YouTube) would stutter. NVIDIA has some tricks up their sleeves with the new mobile processor designed for pocket HD entertainment too. there needs to be enough power in a mobile CPU to handle "typical PC stuff" to make it worthwhile in the UMPC market. if the first gen Atom can't be at least as powerful and useful as a Prescott Pentium 4 with Hyperthreading, then it won't go very far. likewise, if the first dual-core Atom's we see can't multitask at least as good as a Pentium D (the first dual-core Intel chips), then Intel should go back to the drawing board. those processors are nowhere near as fast as any Core processors of today, but they will still handle Windows Vista Home Premium just fine, given that you have at least 1GB of RAM, and a DX9 vidcard for Aero. I just refurbished a s775 Pentium 4 540 (w/ Hyperthreading) with 1GB of RAM and a cheap DX9 card with Vista Home Premium, and its still pretty responsive. It's still faster than any recent Celeron system (even the new Celeron dual-cores) - it gets a higher score in the Windows Experience Index for processing power too. not too bad, and i gave it away to a group home for underprivileged youths that were happy to receive it. the volunteers that ran the home liked the fact that they could set up the parental controls to make sure nobody abused the machine too. i almost wish Windows SteadyState was released for Windows Vista, but the parental controls still work well enough. anyway, what was I saying?.... "er, Windows XP is just, well....old....quit living in the past, man!" (or something like that)

Oh boy... I can't wait to see how the mac fanatics are going to twist this as 'proof that Vista is failing'... Just wait!!

"XP lives on!" ok....so if you think about it, Windows Vista isn't "Me2", Windows XP is the new DOS. food for thought.

"you can't run Vista on a brand new PC." ya, you know, that PoS 500MHz CPU in the Eee PC you just bought is really capable of multimedia like H.264 video and simultaneous MP3 playback and photo slideshows.... "You can run os X 10.5 on a five year old Macbook." and you can run Windows XP with 64MB of RAM, which in both cases is sad but true (and in both cases, not something you want to try unless you're the type that likes to stare at a wall while you wait for paint to dry). WTF, indeed! XP

I bought a new E-machines computer in 2001 the same month XP was released for $550 (included monitor too)... about 4 years ago I upgraded the ram, but otherwise it's the same machine I bought almost 7 years ago.... It can run Vista. Slow? Sure, but it meets the minimum requirements.

"OSX runs on Macs, Apple TVs and iPhones." if you honestly believe that the "OSX" that's on Apple TV's and iPhones is the same as what's on your Mac, then you're a bigger fool than i originally thought. that's like saying "my cellphone runs Linux"....ok, well what is Linux then? Linux is a kernel, nothing more. does it have the KDE or Gnome shell? no. can it run OpenOffice? no. so equating it to its desktop counterpart is disingenious at best. likewise, does the iPhone's "OSX" run desktop OSX software? no. a kernel alone does not an operating system make.

"Wow, Waethorn, you even attack me when I defend Microsoft." no, it was for turning this into another Mac speech. if i want a mobile device, i don't want limited hardware ruining the experience of a good operating system platform. Windows Vista runs great on a full-featured computer. if a piece of hardware includes "Windows Vista" on it, i want, nay, EXPECT it to have the same kind of functionality of "Windows Vista" on a modest PC. if it's going to be a "mobile" device, then it better damn well have an operating system designed for it. trying to run a full-featured OS on a limited device (or advertising it as if it were full-featured) is a joke. similarly, after using Windows Vista on a daily basis, going to XP is, well, a step back.

"Not sure why you're against any suggestion that could improve windows." and i'm not sure how you rationalize the argument that minimalizing Windows can somehow improve it. that's the same argument that Linux users use. i guess that's the excuse you use to say that an iPhone uses "OS X".

"I would point out, however, that I've often argued that Microsoft should drop backwards compatibility, in effect creating a brand new OS. Doing so would require some form of compatibility through virtualization, which is certainly doable." i would disagree with that assessment. virtualization hardware is nowhere close to being something that every single computer has, nor is application virtualization software mature enough to take advantage of that hardware. desktop virtualization is a half-azzed approach for just virtualizing specific applications. until hardware VT and/or hypervisor technology can do virtualization on an app-by-app basis, it's just not feasible to "virtualize" legacy environments because of one thing: pure software-based application virtualization is exactly identical to having backwards compatible API's.

"Almost the entire software market, save a niche of performance-hungry applications, are so out-classed by today's hardware that any loss to overhead is like pissing in the ocean for modern processing. Never mind that we're projecting into the future, where dramatically faster processing than today will be asked to run today's applications." that's such a convoluted statement that i don't think even you know what that means. in the first sentence you say that today's software is outclassed by today's hardware, and yet in the second, you state that tomorrow's faster hardware will be tasked to run today's software (which is wrong - software gets replaced as fast as the hardware). so which is it? "She runs her real estate web applications on her Macbook under parallels since it's a proprietary IE-only site (as much of real estate is)." sorry, but a website is not a local application, so you don't even have a point of argument with that statement. "I only had two years of computer science before switching to film, but I think I'm safe in guessing that this statement is utterly false." given your previous "points", you must've flunked out of CS then. software-based application virtualization and backwards compatible API's are both the same thing - an software layer that emulates a legacy environment. the only difference is in the method of coding. the end result is the same: lesser performance than the overhead native software layer. btw: if you must know, even Apple's so-called "64-bit" support isn't native. if you really want the explanation on this, just read my comments that start here (and continue to page 3): http://windowsitpro.com/articles/index.cfm?articleid=98785&cpage=2#feedb... so no, you can't claim that Apple somehow broke away from legacy 32-bit support in OS X. Microsoft actually beat them to it with a much more modern design (even prior to Vista, with XP x64). if they wanted to completely do away with 32-bit support in Windows x64 versions, all they have to do is drop the WOW64 layer. Apple, on the other hand, would have to do a total rewrite of OS X.