People will stick with XP until the bitter end

I’m a huge fan of Windows XP and quite frankly I hate Windows 7. And it would seem I’m not the only one. Based on this survey, 48% of IT Pros are going to hold onto Windows XP until its final days in 2014. Now, in 4 years I can only image that we will finally be off 32bit apps and everything will be in the 64bit world so I can’t see holding onto XP for quite that long. The few machines I still have running XP will probably expire before we hit 2014. But I do see the point. Windows 7 offers nothing to the average business user. It’s not more productive. It’s not faster. It’s not simpler to use. I have Windows 7 64bit on a Xeon E450 3.0GHz machine with 8 GB of Ram and it’s a complete piece of crap! Windows is slow in doing just about everything! I don’t see the average office worker having a machine anything like this so why would you upgrade to get less performance?

My machine at home is also a Quad Core setup with 8GB of Ram, but I’ve had plenty of problems with that machine too. I’ve made my grievances known about Win7, so I understand why IT shops don’t want to get away from XP. It simply works and it’s easy to find what you’re looking for. It very quickly won’t support the latest software (not that it does now) but if you have a working copy of Office with email and access to the web, why do you need Windows 7? That is a huge investment to gain very little productivity. How is that 64bit version of Office treating you? Can you type 10x faster in Word now? How about that 64bit browser, is the web twice as fast?

XP is still a damn fine OS for getting the job done. I know for sure I’m not upgrading until at least 2014 and even then Windows will not be my first choice.