Microsoft Just Wants IE6 to Die

^^^This, my company is stuck in the dark ages, still on XP, still on IE6, still on 7 year old P4's with HT. Trouble is they won't upgrade any of the hardware so we are stuck with what we have. I'm just waiting for the 11 year old server to die - then they will have to do something.

A company I worked for last year upgraded all of their 5 year old systems to brand spanking new Core 2's but they took the downgrade to XP option and it ran like lightning and I used to have Outlook, 3 large Excel docs, 3-4 IE windows and 7 SAP sessions constantly on the go so I don't blame a lot of company's for sticking with it. On a 2GB system running Windows Vista or 7 it just wouldn't have been as snappy to use.

Win 7 is a great consumer OS, and because of it's widespread adoption business are going to be forced to adopt it so that their employee's actually know how to use their work computers, but they don't need it.
 
^^^This, my company is stuck in the dark ages, still on XP, still on IE6, still on 7 year old P4's with HT. Trouble is they won't upgrade any of the hardware so we are stuck with what we have. I'm just waiting for the 11 year old server to die - then they will have to do something.

They could upgrade to IE8 and still run XP.

I still use XP as i am awaiting fundage for another win 7 licence and my choice of main rig hardware to settle down, however I have junked IE6 in favour of IE8 and will probaly go to IE9 when its released

IE9 won't run under XP.
 
Corporate versions of XP can't run Firefox, or Chome, or Opera, or Safari? :rolleyes:

A company I worked for last year upgraded all of their 5 year old systems to brand spanking new Core 2's but they took the downgrade to XP option and it ran like lightning and I used to have Outlook, 3 large Excel docs, 3-4 IE windows and 7 SAP sessions constantly on the go so I don't blame a lot of company's for sticking with it. On a 2GB system running Windows Vista or 7 it just wouldn't have been as snappy to use.

Win 7 is a great consumer OS, and because of it's widespread adoption business are going to be forced to adopt it so that their employee's actually know how to use their work computers, but they don't need it.

I got a Core i5-520M laptop with 4Gb RAM for work. At work I have a locked down corporate XP image. For home I have a separate hard drive for the same machine. I just used the key from the bottom of the laptop and installed Win 7 pro x64 on y own drive and I swap between the drives.

My experience is that Win 7 actually is faster overall. XP feels leaner and lightweight, but Win 7 just takes better advantage of the systems resources and overall winds up on top, IMHO. XP is faster in fits and starts but just not as smooth or predictable overall and thus winds up getting the job done more slowly.

Not to mention that it is more secure, prettier to look at AND has DX11 :p

Btw. Core2Duo is by no means new anymore. It's two generations old now that Sandy Bridge laptops are out. :p
 
^^^This, my company is stuck in the dark ages, still on XP, still on IE6, still on 7 year old P4's with HT. Trouble is they won't upgrade any of the hardware so we are stuck with what we have. I'm just waiting for the 11 year old server to die - then they will have to do something.

Haha, I feel your pain. My company is exactly this, except once I became the head IT guy I installed Firefox on all the computers. The computers are still pieces of 7-year old crap with 512mb of ram that the company doesn't want to invest to replace, but at least they have a modern browser.
 
Zarathustra[H];1036937625 said:
I got a Core i5-520M laptop with 4Gb RAM for work. At work I have a locked down corporate XP image. For home I have a separate hard drive for the same machine. I just used the key from the bottom of the laptop and installed Win 7 pro x64 on y own drive and I swap between the drives.

A spec which would be complete overkill for your average data entry/customer service grunt.

Zarathustra[H];1036937625 said:
My experience is that Win 7 actually is faster overall. XP feels leaner and lightweight, but Win 7 just takes better advantage of the systems resources and overall winds up on top, IMHO. XP is faster in fits and starts but just not as smooth or predictable overall and thus winds up getting the job done more slowly.

I agree on a higher end system it works better. XP was from a time where 512mb of ram was a good spec where as I would say 2gb is the sane starting point for productively being able to use a Win 7 machine. Once you get to 2gb or beyond it does work better as you said the prefetch and cache is far better executed.

Zarathustra[H];1036937625 said:
Not to mention that it is more secure, prettier to look at AND has DX11 :p

Security wise being sat behind a corporate firewall/proxy/av is going to protect against all but the most foolish of uses. The biggest fault I saw with my company's use of XP was all users had to be admin or it wouldn't even let you agree to the AUP but that's a poor IT department rather than XP being flawed. As for looking pretty, for work I have every UI trinket turned off and it back to the classic Windows theme. I need every pixel on screen for information not shiny see through giant buttons and borders :)

Zarathustra[H];1036937625 said:
Btw. Core2Duo is by no means new anymore. It's two generations old now that Sandy Bridge laptops are out. :p

To be honest I've said last year but I've not got in the habit of it being 2011 yet it was 2009 :)
 
A spec which would be complete overkill for your average data entry/customer service grunt.

Pretty much overkill for what I do as an engineer as well. Truth is te stuf that uses the most CPU power these days is not most professional applications.

Even my statistical and design software does not need this kid of CPU.

Outside of the enthusiast community, media encoding and certain scientific applications it quickly gets rather difficult to justify new CPU's for most people.

When non-enthusiasts complain their computers are slow I usually just recommend people save some money by just getting some more ram, and doing a fresh windows install...
 
Zarathustra[H];1036938085 said:
Pretty much overkill for what I do as an engineer as well. Truth is te stuf that uses the most CPU power these days is not most professional applications.

Even my statistical and design software does not need this kid of CPU.

Outside of the enthusiast community, media encoding and certain scientific applications it quickly gets rather difficult to justify new CPU's for most people.

When non-enthusiasts complain their computers are slow I usually just recommend people save some money by just getting some more ram, and doing a fresh windows install...

The problem is that productivity wise Microsoft peaked with XP and Office 2003. Quite simply they are all the office tools you need for most professional usage.

The extra power computers currently have is only of use for entertainment and is some way off us all having an IBM Watson running on our desktop lending a hand to our work.
 
LOL! Someone go tell this to the Einsteins in HP IT outsourcing who live, die, and make it a requirement to run IE6 in order to get your problem resolved.

They live and die by Netmeeting as well.
 
Those numbers in the U.S. seem rather low. I'm a web developer and I have to say the number of our clients that use I.E.6 is probably closer to 20-25% not less than 3%. Especially in the small business realm, it seems like the task of upgrading a dozen or two (or even 1 or 2) computers to a newer version of internet explorer is too much, and so we've had to support that piece of crap years longer than I would like.
 
Those numbers in the U.S. seem rather low. I'm a web developer and I have to say the number of our clients that use I.E.6 is probably closer to 20-25% not less than 3%. Especially in the small business realm, it seems like the task of upgrading a dozen or two (or even 1 or 2) computers to a newer version of internet explorer is too much, and so we've had to support that piece of crap years longer than I would like.

I suspect the US figures are greatly helped by the large number of high tech companies there.

MS, Google, Facebook, IBM etc... are probably all on up to the minute software with large number of employee's bolstering the stats.
 
I suspect the US figures are greatly helped by the large number of high tech companies there.

MS, Google, Facebook, IBM etc... are probably all on up to the minute software with large number of employee's bolstering the stats.

Agreed. Add to that that most new computers have shipped with either Vista or Win7 for the last several years, which means at least IE7.

Unless you already own a license, as a consumer its not that easy to find a copy of XP, let alone get a machine shipped with it.

Seeing how many people don't understand computers and just get rid of and replace them when they "feel slow" when a ram upgrade and a fresh windows install likely would have solved all their problems for the tasks that they perform, I am not surprised to see the IE6 numbers so low.

Also, the numbers are probably skewed because they are tracked by how much people are browsing on them. At a lot (most?) workplaces with corporate XP and IE6 machines it is probably frowned upon to be spending too much time on the web instead of working, and as such these machines are underrepresented in the stats.
 
I believe you meant to say "Just about any self respecting IT person wants IE6 to die".

I also would like XP to just die already, I am beyond sick of supporting end users on that crappy os.

And how many still haven't figured out that the problem is microsoft.
 
I was just thinking about how XP Mode for Windows 7 comes with IE6 and how they have hidden updates (to a higher version) for IE in Windows update for it. I know XP Mode is for running applications that aren't compatible with Windows 7 but if they really want IE6 to die...
 
I was just thinking about how XP Mode for Windows 7 comes with IE6 and how they have hidden updates (to a higher version) for IE in Windows update for it. I know XP Mode is for running applications that aren't compatible with Windows 7 but if they really want IE6 to die...
They also want XP to die. Web based IE6 craplications are one of the biggest stumbling blocks companies face in trying to ditch XP.
 
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