Support for Windows XP is ending soon

HI WKIKI Author,

    Anything relating to APPLE PCs do not belong in this Microsoft forum. And I wont choose any one of them, I will stick to Mirosoft and its products. To me Apple PCs and its OS are just a fly in the oitment!

From Edmond the Professor

Hi Cameron,

     It is a free country, you can hate anything you want, But you wait when your fancy PC with Windows 8 crashes, is flawed to the hilt, It has not been tested enough to be a reliable OS like XP. then you will hate it even more! Where is your BOOT DVD to repair it? Blame anybody, but it is your own fault if you do not get a BOOT DVD for Windows for your PC!!! Yay for me having a Boot DVD for Windows 7 64- bit... some idiot threw it out along with the Laptop battery I can use! Or how is this? I buy a second refurbished PC and it comes with its own BOOT CD for Windows XP PRO! It saves the day on its sister PC just to repair it for a missing DLL? I did not have to key in its product key to do so!!! You want to trash your PC with Windows XP? I will be more than glad to take it off your hands.

     ♫"One Man's trash is my Treasure!"♫ So you are bored with Windows XP? IS it the WHY you hate it? It is matter of expertise how you operate ANY PC. regardless of OS. Of course, I have more PCs with Windows XP than I do Windows 7. They both work well, it is the features they can do, or cannot do that matters. If one can't the other can! Fo me, it what works for my needs at hand. and to me, Microsoft is like any business, will trash the good for the not so good, as in the new version of Windows they are trying to pawn off to the public. WHO is Microsoft kidding about Windows 8? It is made like a three-year old kid at a keyboard trying to plink on a piano! As long as my six PCs out of nine work with XP, I will use Windows XP... And I can get more refurbished PCs still work with Windows XP on line, because it is my expertise that keeps the PC going with my equipment. I am not TRASHING my fancy scanner because Microsoft and HP wont produce the drivers for Vista or 7. It out does any other flat-bed scanner you can buy now, because they are a mere toy to the one I have. It works perfectly with Windows XP and 98! To me, it is the hardware that determines Which OS I like... So MY vote is XP all the way! I will go as far as to lose 8 partitions of data to fix a problem of one HDD! And in the end, I find the problem with a bad SATA Power cable! I swapped drives and got me a new power cable and that solves the problem when Windows XP keeps on asking to do an error check on one of my internal drives every time I start up. ♫Not anymore!♫.

From Edmond The Hardware and Software Engineer

First off I want to say that I think that Macs are fine computers, most Mac owners are very pleased with their purchase.

The Apple model is different than the Microsoft model so you can't just extract one facet of a model and hold it against the whole other model.  Apple is mostly a hardware company while Microsoft is mostly a software company.  The respective models have served both companies well, Apple is the largest technology company in the world and with annual revenues of $165B it ranks at number 15 on Forbes list of biggest public companies, Microsoft is at number 41 with revenues of $75B.

Now lets debunk the "forever free Mac OS upgrades" myth. For starters I ask that you find a published Mac OS lifecycle support policy from Apple, if you find such a policy I will then ask you lead an expedition to find yeti, I suspect you will have more luck finding the later.  Microsoft has a clearly stated published policy to which they can be held accountable, Apple on the other hand has never publicly stated anything about OS support so they can't be held accountable to anything, the old motto of "if we say nothing we can't be accused of lying" holds them accountable to nothing!  The word out there is that there is an n-2 support policy but that is just words based on Apple's past practice and while it does seem to follow practice Apple has never commented on the supposed policy, let alone confirm it.

Now lets look at the facts:

1-  To upgrade to the latest Mac OS x v10.9 "Mavericks" you must have at least v10.6 "Snow Leopard" installed, if you do not have at least Snow Leopard you must purchase the $20 upgrade, not very expensive but still not free.

2-  If you would have bought a Mac desktop in 2001 when Windows XP was released you would have bought a Power Mac G4 with OS X v10.1 "Puma" installed.  The Power Mac G4 cannot be upgraded to Mavericks (hardware not supported).  

3-  In early 2006 you would have bought a Power Mac G5 with OS X v10.4 "Tiger" installed.  The Power Mac G5 cannot be upgraded to Mavericks (hardware not supported).

3-  Between August 2006 and April 2007 you would have bought a Mac Pro Woodcrest with OS X v10.4 Tiger installed.  The Mac Pro Woodcrest cannot be upgraded to Mavericks (hardware not supported).

4-  Between April 2007 and January 8, 2008 you would have bought a Mac Pro Clovertown with either OS X v10.4 "Tiger" or v10.5 "Leopard" installed.  The Mac Pro Clovertown cannot be upgraded to Mavericks (hardware not supported).

5-  After January 8, 2008 you would have bought a Mac Pro Harpertown or later model, these Mac Pros can be ugraded to Maverick (hardware supported).

6-  If you bought your Mac Pro Harpertown before August 28, 2009 it shipped with OS X v10.5 Leopard so you will still have to pay $20 to upgrade to the minimum Snow Leopard requirement before you can upgrade to Mavericks.

7-  OS X v10.5 Leopard is no longer supported, support ended when v10.7 Lion shipped in July 2011, the last security update for Leopard was in June 2011.  Leopard was released in October 2007, figure it out support for Leopard lasted less than four years, and if you were one of the unfortunate who bought an expensive Mac Pro Clovertown in early January 2008 the whole expensive thing was supported for a grand total of about 42 months!

8-  If you are running Snow Leopard on any Mac before the Mac Pro Harpertownd and following Apple's n-2 OS support practice it's a pretty safe bet that support for Snow Leopard has ended and that you are at the end of the line with your pre Harpertown Mac... of course no one from Apple will either confirm or deny this because it would hurt their "hardware model" if everyone knew the real truth behind the "free" OS upgrades.

You see, Mac OS upgrades are free but you have to buy a $3,000 Mac every 4-6 years to run the upgrade.  In reality Mac operating system versions are rarely supported for more than four years and if your Mac cannot handle the newest version well tough bananas, either run it without support or go buy a new Mac!  On the other hand for about 13 years and as long as the hardware suppliers supplied drivers you could have installed Windows XP on just about any computer, even on an old Mac no longer fit for Snow Leopard and Microsoft would have supported it!

John