OMG - I can't get XP anymore!

[actech]

I've almost finished migrating our entire college over to Win 7 and I'm glad to see the end of XP. Yes it was a great OS but it is almost 10 years old and I felt it was time to move on. I too feel that win7 runs better on some of our machines than XP did and certainly runs the big programs (ie autocad and corel) faster.

[RabbieBurns]

What's XP?

[mattx]

What's XP?

What you get playing Black Ops....

[SimpleSi]

The problems with this situation are several - for literally years MS has been trying to kill off XP and has announced its end serveral times - each time its been easy to get around it (twinload/xp downgrade cd/netbooks excempt etc) so I've managed to avoid the issue.

Now, if this one turns out to be the actuall death knell, I'm going to have a bit of a problem when my schools do there usual end of finance year and splurge out of IT equip (that I've been asking them all year for!) as I'm not going to be able to purchase kit that I know I can get everything to work with

I operate my schools in a simple as mode as possible (to reduce my network admin time - I look after 7/week and do a bit of TA IT support/teaching as well) so I have a single user/full admin rights client setup.

This saves time and money (don't get me wrong - if I had fully setup domains running smoothly _ i'm sure they'd also take same amount of time to administer ) as I don't have to fork out dosh to MS for VLKs and can just utilise the OS (Win98SE when I started - XP Home for last 6 years) that comes with the machine.

I work in primaries, I don't have any trainee hackers attacking my networks and therefore I don't need to lock things down.

A lot of my software (Textease/blackcat super tools( )Tizzy's toybox etc was bought in Win98 days and if I'm lucky has been dragged into working on XP. A lot of it still does a good job at educating pupils and the cost/benefit of "upgrading" is a close decision so either there's going to be a fair bit of work getting them to work on Win7 or theres going to be cost to pay for new software.

(I'm lucky that MS have decided to make PhotoStory work on Win7 otherwise we'd be truely stuff!)

Now on a personal level, I like a challenge but I've now got to decide whether to ask for loads of dosh/spend a load of time to upgrade to W2k8 and Win7 Proffesional or just spend time (no money) in getting Win7 Home to play nicely on my setups/software.

On a personal experience with Win7, I have to say it has worked flawlessly on my 2 daughters laptops for the past 18months and I'm very impressed with its stability - it could be the next WfWg3.11

Si