cogadh: A little less than half of the nearly 2 billion PCs in the world are still running XP right now. That doesn't sound very dead to me and there is no way all those machines will be dead in three years. There will still be people vainly screaming at MS to continue supporting XP even in 2014.

cogadh: A little less than half of the nearly 2 billion PCs in the world are still running XP right now. That doesn't sound very dead to me and there is no way all those machines will be dead in three years. There will still be people vainly screaming at MS to continue supporting XP even in 2014.

TheJoe: Maggots eating the flesh, Cogadh. Maggots eating the flesh.

orcishgamer: Yeah but look at a chart at how many 0 days pop up per month on XP (that we even find out about, apparently douchebag companies like HBGary feel free to stockpile unknown ones and sell them to government or private parties and somehow this is legal!). It's not a good OS at this point. If it weren't for gaming I wouldn't have it at all.

Navagon: There's also the fact that compared to Win7 XP is about as stable as Tom Cruise.

Kabuto: Upgrades are transferable. However when I upgraded over an OEM license I recall reading that I now forfeit my original Vista OEM license and Windows 7 is now tied to my macine. If you upgrade over a retail license, that doesn't apply.

BTW, why do you feel tying a cheaper OEM license to a mobo as being screwed over? Microsoft will reactivate your license over the phone if you explain and show you've replaced the defective mobo with an identical or equivalent one.

cogadh: That's not really a fair comparison, XP is about as rock-solid stable as they come. There's no denying 7 is better, but its not like XP is crash-prone mess like Vista was. To paraphrase: compared to XP, Vista was about as stable as Charlie Sheen.

Foxhack: Easy. I hate DRM that ties to hardware in any way, shape or form - plus, calling Microsoft USA from Mexico is super expensive (up to 80 cents per minute). I called Microsoft Mexico and they weren't too keen on me owning a retail US English copy of XP. Imagine what they'll do if they find a Mexican getting his hands on an OEM copy? They'll probably send the Federales after me.

I just really don't think buying an OEM license is a good idea for me. Especially if you're like me and your computer breaks down every three to five years. (This system's pretty close to dying already.)

I plan to upgrade to Windows 7, and I was thinking of going with Pro, but since XP Mode isn't really that useful I can live with Virtualbox / VMWare on the system.

Kabuto: Well nobody said you had to buy an oem license. It is cheaper for a reason afterall. But a full retail copy and you'll never have to worry.

Navagon: Yeah, it certainly used to be fairly stable most of the time. But I found that, near the time I was abandoning it (as Win7 was released) I wasn't the only one abandoning it. Clearly driver manufacturers - especially those who package all the supported OS drivers into one file - where abandoning it too.

cogadh: What hardware are you running that no longer supports XP for drivers?

Navagon: The main one was ATI. Which is why I switched to Nvidia not all that long before upgrading to Win7. I gave the card to my brother and we had to go back a full year's worth of ATI drivers before finding some that let him boot Windows XP. Now that's what I call fucked.

But then it's ATI and I had it coming when I gave them another chance and got the bloody card in the first place. Good hardware though. Just a shame their drivers seem to be designed to cripple the cards as much as possible in ever increasing increments.

cogadh: That's not dropping XP support, that's just ATI's perennially terrible driver support for ya. I got burned by them one time too many when I first switched to XP way back when and I haven't (voluntarily) gone back to them again. I do still have an XP laptop with an ATI graphics solution and I have the same problem; the current driver that claims to be for XP crashes the machine, but the older ones will let it boot.