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Re: quaint old computers, was "Archived-At" headers

2014-03-15 04:25:24


--On Friday, March 14, 2014 20:43 +0000 John Levine
<johnl(_at_)taugh(_dot_)com> wrote:

I don't  - I just like guidance on what to upgrade to e.g
will XP stop working in April when it goes out of currency?

No, but they'll stop fixing security bugs, so you'll fairly
soon be pwn3d.

Perhaps you could splurge on a ?200 Windows 7 laptop, or check
out the wonders of Ubuntu.

--On Friday, March 14, 2014 14:04 -0700 Douglas Otis
<doug(_dot_)mtview(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com> wrote:

 A real concern is the vast majority industrial controls such
as ATMs using Windows XP.  It seems this somewhat hidden
segment of the market lacks effective incentives.

John and Doug,

It is not clear to me that this is a useful topic for the IETF
list, but...

I'm deeply sympathetic to Microsoft's issues with trying to
maintain an old operating system that has a well-deserved
reputation for being bug- and security-hole-ridden (albeit not
as bad as some of its predecessors).  At the same time, some of
us have a strong preference for machines in the class most
recently known as "netbooks" -- screens in the 7 - 9 inch range,
maybe stretching to 10 or 10.1, but no larger; weight under 1 Kg
including power supply "bricks"; real (as distinct from
chicklet, touch/promimity, or onscreen keyboards), long battery
life; etc.  Because they have tended to be a little underpowered
for the fancy graphics and other demands of Windows from Vista
forward, my recollection is that those machines were shipping
with XP well into 2010 and probably into 2011.  So they are not
quite as ancient as some of the correspondence implies.  More
important, there are, as far as I know, no replacements: the
Ultrabooks (and the smallest Mac) are larger, heavier, and don't
provide the battery life.  Windows 7 and 8 (even Win 7 Starter)
simply won't run acceptably on that range of machines.

So it isn't just the embedded machines... or being too cheap to
buy a Win 7 (or 8) laptop.

   john