Downgrade rights extended for Windows XP until 2020

Saw that a few days ago on MaximumPC.com. So support will be there? I wonder??

That's really targeted at businesses who are still running legacy applications or homegrown apps that won't run under Windows 7. Otherwise, no one in their right mind would ever downgrade back to XP.

I wonder at what point Cakewalk will drop support for XP, now that XP is likely to be around for so long. I'm guessing they'll wait for one year after Windows 8 comes out... So, Windows 8 is due about 2012... so maybe 2013? Give them until the first Service Pack of Windows 8? Seems fair enough.

Just speculating. Seems like a burden to Cakewalk to keep support going for XP for too many more years, especially since XP will be superseded by Vista, 7 and 8. I certainly wouldn't fault them for dropping official support in a few years.

Downgrade rights are where you pay for the latest version of Windows 7 but they allow you to image new machines with Windows XP. As said above, some legacy systems are running fine with specific drivers in large corporations. Upgrading means application and driver testing, hardware upgrades, more memory, new network cards etc. It can be very costly for large companies to upgrade all their hardware just to go to a new OS. Downgrade is usually a short term approach to managing hardware and application migration. When I worked for Microsoft, had lots of customers that wanted this ability.

XP on a XP era computer is a good idea. On a modern computer it's madness.

Upgrading Windows XP era to Windows 7 is madness.

Glyn Barnes

ston


Vista's problems stem equally from customers' perception (poor marketing?) as they do from technical flaws.  .

That coupled with the reluctance of hardware manufactures to get their drivers sorted and software manufactures dislike for UAC etc.

I don't think it was a very smart move by Microsoft to expect hardware vendors to have to re-write all their drivers.  There were also a great many applications that weren't compatible with Vista, which ran perfectly fine under XP.

So where does this leave the end-user of the OS?  All they want to do is to upgrade the OS and keep using it.  If the OS has very poor backwards compatibility, then the end user sure doesn't want to wait until all of the software/drivers he's used to running is updated, especially if that results in having to pay additional fees...and the vendors aren't going to want to spend a great deal of development resource on modifying their code only to give it away for free.

Windows 7 is much more backwards compatible with XP than Vista, I believe that it even has some kind of 'XP compatibility wizard' - for good reason!

As for eras of computers...well, mine spans a good five eras I'd say :-D  I'm still using the same PCI audio cards that I've had for over 11 years now; 2x Creamware Pulsar II DSP cards which I'd still rate above pretty much anything else on the market.  They've been run under Windows '98, 2000 and XP.  The rest of the machine certainly has the clout to run Windows 7 as there have been a number of upgrades since I initially changed to using XP, so I disagree that there needs to be some kind of tight matching between operating system and hardware.

Glyn Barnes


XP on a XP era computer is a good idea. On a modern computer it's madness.

Upgrading Windows XP era to Windows 7 is madness.

Based on this are you saying I would gain performance buy downgrading to XP Pro?
(see my specs)

Here is something that was stated in a Win 7 newsletter:

"For those who are disappointed that Wave 4 (and IE9) don't work with Windows XP, all I can say is that XP is a ten year old OS and Microsoft has moved on. Obviously many computer users haven't, but there does come a time when backward compatibility has to be sacrificed if you want to be able to add new features and functionalities. The price of sticking with your ten-year-old automobile is not having some of the features that new cars have, and the same is true when you decide to stick with an old OS. The car and the OS may still work perfectly well and get you where you're going, but if you want the fancy new stuff, you have to upgrade. I know that's not the answer that XP users want to hear; it's just the reality."

OK, Twigman... whatever floats your boat. I'm loving Windows 7. And that part about XP never crashing, that's a bunch of hooey.

Nobody ever believed me when I told them I had a pefectly stable Win '98 SE!

Half the trick's finding a stable configuration of all the hardware components, peripherals, drivers, O.S. and applications that need to somehow work together.  I've been doing low-level development for quite some time now and am always amazed that a modern computer system comes up and works at all.

[Can we all agree that Win ME was rubbish? ;-)]

ston


[Can we all agree that Win ME was rubbish? ;-)]

I with you on that one.