Windows XP Refuses to Die

September 28, 2007 By Nick Mokey

Windows XP Refuses to Die

Despite earlier promises from Microsoft that XP would stop selling in January, consumer demand has forced the company to extend its life five months.

It’s rare that a company has to forcefully kill off a product that continue to sell, but that’s exactly what Microsoft has planned to do with Windows XP in order to spur sales of its newer Windows Vista operating system. The trouble is, not everyone’s happy about it: Consumer feedback has prompted Microsoft to stay XP’s date of execution for five months.

With the release of Vista, Microsoft originally stated that Windows XP would continue to sit on store shelves and appear in new computers until January 30, 2008. With that date quickly approaching, the company announced yesterday that the new date would be June 30, 2008, due to clear feedback from “customers who needed a bit more time.”

Microsoft corporate vice president Mike Nash made it clear that consumers and manufacturers alike weren’t all ready to switch. “We were a little ambitious to think that we would need to make Windows XP available for only a year after the release of Windows Vista,” he said in a statement.

Once June rolls around, there will still be exceptions. Microsoft will continue to offer Windows XP Starter Edition for ultra-low cost PCs until June 30, 2010.

Showing 3 comments

Craig at 9:36pm 9th October 2007 My notebooks of choice are the ultra-small, ultra-light variety. As such, they tend to come with minimal computing horsepower -- 1.2GHz processors and a gig of RAM is fairly typical. On these devices, which are by no means "budget computers," Vista is simply untenable. XP runs great, so I always request that. I really hope Vista is killed off quickly.
Tyler Armstrong at 9:25am 1st October 2007 I'm really hoping Vista becomes the next ME and Microsoft just abandons it as such. Not so sure that could happen though with the huge capital expenditure that has been made on Vista.
Rosen Billblatt at 2:16pm 29th September 2007 Looks bad for Vista.
I bought a new laptop with vista some months ago, and was VERY disappointed. Slow, buggy, intrusive.
But instead of reverting to XP, I have installed ubuntu linux in dual boot on it and have used vista only occasionally ever since.
I'm very disappointed with vista and very satisfied with ubuntu linux, that worked out of the box without all those annoying windows programs running in the background in order to check what I'm doing on my own PC and slowing things down. I think I'll stick to ubuntu now, and maybe soon erase vista completely from my hard disk. Good riddance.