At 4/11/16 10:46 PM, NeonSpider wrote:
At 4/11/16 04:33 PM, EcG-TracyJackson wrote:
By now, you should really have either Windows 7 or 10.
The problem with that thinking is oftentimes new Windows versions like to break things in very incompatible ways hardware-wise. So it's often not as simple a problem as replace the Windows XP or Windows Vista with Windows 7 or Windows 10. Oftentimes you'll just flat-out need a brand new computer entirely because your hardware is outdated for the modern OS.
Windows version changes definitely do have a reputation for breaking things both in terms of software and hardware. I've spent many hundreds of hours hacking to get legacy software working on newer operating systems after an upgrade.
However, EcG does have a point. You really do not want to be running Windows XP right now. The OS is full of serious bugs and security vulnerabilities, most of which will probably never be fixed since official support has been terminated and there is little public interest in maintaining it (assuming it can even be maintained considering that it is a closed-source proprietary software.)
And it's also a bit ridiculous to expect people to keep buying new computers all the time to "keep up" also, as those are quite an expense. It should be perfectly reasonable to still use a computer that's 5 to 10 years old. You shouldn't have to replace the computer every 2 years, like Microsoft seems to want.
At least Linux can get by on older hardware just fine. Yeah at some point you'll want a new machine, but it's just not cost-effective for the average person to essentially buy a new computer every couple of years, when there's no technical reason what they're using shouldn't still work (hardware is still perfectly fine) but just because an OS is no longer supported and a newer version of that OS has more stringent hardware requirements than the system meets.
Cue in all the people who upgraded their Windows 7 or Windows 8 or 8.1 machines to Windows 10 and got hit with nasty surprises due to essentially their hardware being incompatible with it. And then *not* being able to go back to their previous OS in some cases.
Upgrading *nix systems typically doesn't cause issues as long as they were set up properly to begin with. You mostly encounter issues with the servers that are set up badly, and then have shitloads of hacks applied to core libraries that get overwritten after the upgrade. But with Windows, the user has no control. Microsoft breaks things and you either take it or spend however many hundreds of hours hacking to work around the bug (only to have said workaround break in a subsequent upgrade.)
The problem with Windows is that its an operating system so inherently flawed that it is arguably broken by design. There is little that can actually be done to fix Windows. I will admit they've improved in some areas since the old days, but there is still a whole lot of ugly going on under the hood.
Its like PHP. Everything is an afterthought or another band-aid solution. So there is this perpetual cycle of Windows "trying" to fix their software with these updates, which often just fixes one problem and introduce X more. Unfortunately for the Windows end user, downloading these updates is a "damned if you do, even more damned if you don't" situation.
