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The only ones clinging onto XP are the power users and uber tech geeks.

That is not so. It is mostly public offices and companies that were sleeping at the wheel. E.g. the city of Berlin, Germany still has 26.000 users on XP and no real plan to get them off. Many other federal, state or municipal offices are in the same situation. There are not enough geeks in the world to fill these masses. 17% must be something like 200 Million users.

I also read that the electricity board in the UK has a couple of hundred thousand users that are still on XP. The cost of migration is enormous - not only for the new gear but for program conversion and education of the end users.

Win-10 will be lucky to get to x-p numbers.

eatup said:

Some users have different criteria for abandoning XP. For me, these two have to be met to convince me to upgrade:

1. I want raw computing power. I don't need the extra bloat from the host OS. I've timed application load times on the various Windows. W7 took 20% longer to load applications than XP on the same modern machine. A measure of raw computing power is the amount of frames (not games but real life work) an app is capable of outputting. It serves me no purpose at all when I can get 6x more fps in XP than W8.1

2. I don't need the OS to f*** with the video/audio output. Artificially degrading video/audio just to appease a few select media companies serves me no purpose for work-related apps.

As such, Linux looks like a good choice to host an XP virtual machine over using W10 natively b/c 1. Linux doesn't have bloat, and 2. Linux doesn't artificially affect the video/audio output.

I take it that you are referring to the Aero experience when discussing the AV degradation? Because Aero actually uses the GPU for acceleration. Or was it something else? I know that Vista/7/8 all make recording from the sound card output difficult (and this was indeed easier and more adjustable in XP)

Where do you get the idea that Linux, Unix, Solaris or any other xNix OS that uses a desktop environment does not have bloat? Check out Ubuntu with the Unity interface, or various Gnome implementations. Some of them require 2 GB of RAM. Yes I use Puppy Linux on a old notebook PC and it's lightweight (more like Windows NT 4 as a reference of comparison), But that's not universal.

Jody Thornton said:

eatup said:

...
2. I don't need the OS to f*** with the video/audio output. Artificially degrading video/audio just to appease a few select media companies serves me no purpose for work-related apps.

I take it that you are referring to the Aero experience when discussing the AV degradation?

I believe that comment is about DRM.