Tuesday, 1 July 2008

Sales of XP Stops, Petition to Keep it Starts

Microsoft Corp. will today officially stop selling Windows XP, the operating system (OS) that animates millions of personal computers around the world. However this is hardly great news to the masses that are resisting forced migration to XP’s successor, Vista...

Microsoft Corp. will today officially stop selling Windows XP, the operating system (OS) that animates millions of personal computers around the world.

However this is hardly great news to the masses that are resisting forced migration to XP’s successor, Vista.

In fact, a petition site, Save.XP.com has been launched by technology publication InfoWorld.com to keep the OS “available indefinitely” or least until Windows 7 is available.

Windows 7 is slated for release sometime in 2009.

The petition has so far gathered 210,161 people and will apparently be sent to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

Since its official launch last year, Windows Vista has been the subject of a slew of negative assessments with relation to issues with security, performance, privacy and product activation.

The only way consumers can get their hands on XP from today onwards will be to buy a new PC already preloaded with Vista and then legally “downgrade” it to XP. They will however, have to still pay for the newer OS when they buy the new hardware.

Microsoft said it will still make XP available for emerging markets and ultra-low cost PCs such as the Asus Eee PC. Full technical support will also be available for the older OS until 2009 with limited support until 2014.