Just set up my new PC tonight. Athlon 1700+, 512MB of RAM, EPoX 8KHA+ motherboard and then the old stuff from my previous box, a GeForce2 GTS, hard drives, CD-ROM, SB Live!, etc. With the upgrade I decided to make the XP plunge and in just the first couple hours, I'm so glad I did.

Setup is absolutely the most painless OS setup I've ever been through. From a newly partitioned drive (NTFS) I had a working OS with my internet connection already configured and ready to go in about one hour. More importantly, you're prompted for everything in a super easy fashion and it really takes all the horror out of a system setup. Product Activation is "no big deal", it took an extra 2 minutes for the modem to dial a 1-800 number and that was that.

I'll pop up some more info after I've had time to fool around for a few days. But so far, this is exactly what I expected and it's really cool.

--Dave

Yep, XP is "the bomb". I'd swear all these people decrying the terrible microsoft monopoly never actually tried the product.

And product activation? I have four words for you guys-- get used to it. It's as inevitable as death and taxes. Expect to see it in all software over the next 5-10 years.

I agree, XP is very friendly so far. Setup was very easy, I like the way it automatically detects PCI devices and installs the drivers without you having to lift a finger... it seems to have an enormous number of drivers on file, including ones I needed for my old Brother laser printer.

I also like the picture/fax viewer program that automatically resizes pictures so they can be seen in their entirety.

XP costs $99 and the OS I have now works fine.

Ah, but the trick with XP was to take advantage of the ridiculous deals some places were offering on launch day.

For example, Best Buy offered the following with the purchase of XP:
- Linksys DSL/Cable Modem Gateway, free after rebate ($50 cost up front)
- Rio MP3 player, free after rebate ($50 cost up front)
- 128/256 MB of RAM, free after rebate (which one depended on the version of XP you bought. $20 cost up front)
- free music CD of your choice, up to $20

They also had a bunch of discounts on other stuff, which I personally was not interested in. But the XP upgrade was worth purchasing even if only for the free stuff -- the fact that it's actually an excellent OS in my experience so far is just gravy.

Oops, that last item should be, "up to $15". My bad.

Your loss Mark. This is the best home OS I've ever used. It was simpler to set up and have totally configured for three users than just about anything short of DOS. And well...I'm kinda beyond the command line these days.

If someone's bitching adamantly about XP and Microsoft in general, they obviously haven't tried this new OS.

--Dave

I'm upgrading my primary PC now. (Yes, I know I claimed I'd wait a while... Well, hey, I usually upgrade my PC as soon as the code is gold. So this is waiting for me. Besides, I have my wife's PC for older games.)

What GeForce3 drivers have you guys found work best? I was planning to leave the built-in drivers for now, as I understand they don't have the Civ 3 scrolling problems. But I heard they don't include a full OpenGL implementation... Anyone found trouble-free, fully functional drivers?

Good luck running Return to Wolf on the default XP nVidia drivers.

I tried 22.50 but had trouble under Empire Earth (lots of weird flashing). 22.80 seems to work OK though.

Denny,

the nvidia drivers included with XP do not include an OpenGL driver, so you will need to grab either your card manufacturer's 'official' drivers for xp, or the nvidia reference drivers.

i use the nvidia reference drivers, myself, but i don't have a GeForce3, nor do i have (or plan to have) Civ3.

- mike - WinME wasn't worth the price you paid -

"the nvidia drivers included with XP do not include an OpenGL driver, so you will need to grab either your card manufacturer's 'official' drivers for xp, or the nvidia reference drivers."

This isn't really true. They do include nVidia OpenGL drivers in XP, just not very recent ones. Quake 3 runs but with some funny artifacts.

actually, no they do not. it's the same software-based OpenGL driver they've had for, oh, eons.. and the drivers they DO include are 12.xx series, which had some awesome GL speed- nothing like the slow-as-molasses stuff you get before you drop in some real drivers with accelerated GL.

you should know better than this. :)

- mike - kid tested, self-approved! -

Has anyone done an upgrade from 98SE to XP without a wipe and reinstall of the OS. I want to upgrade my wife's 98SE PC without having to redo everything. Just did that a couple of months ago when I upgraded her system.

Your experiences are welcome.

-DavidCPA

can't say that i personally have, but the 2 people i do know who have tried it say that it *works*, but it leaves all sorts of depreciated files laying around that aren't used by the OS anymore, but may get loaded by an app or game or whatever- the end result being that most of their stuff worked, but things were semi-quirky. they've both since done fresh installs of the OS, without the quirks- or at least they haven't mentioned anything.

nothing new in this department, really- that's always been the case with 'install new OS over old OS' things. for 'best results'; save yourself some future pains and do a clean install, if possible. if anything, it alleviates all sorts of problem-resolution hoops you'll have to jump through when you DO inevitably run into a problem.

- mike - slumming the boards -

The 2280 drivers don't fix the Civ III problem, but they do work pretty flawlessly with Dark Age of Camelot, and they seem stable. I recommend them.

Upgraded from 98SE to XP here, and had no problems. Overall experience was very positive.

"Your loss Mark. This is the best home OS I've ever used. It was simpler to set up and have totally configured for three users than just about anything short of DOS. And well...I'm kinda beyond the command line these days."

First, my current OS is already set up. What could be simpler than that? Second, we don't really need to set up our one computer for multiple users. Multiple users already use it just fine.

"If someone's bitching adamantly about XP and Microsoft in general, they obviously haven't tried this new OS."

I'm not complaining. I just don't want to spend the money to replace something I own that's adequate. Do you buy new parts for your car to make it run better if it's already running with no problems? Some people do, but most of us don't, I'm guessing. That's how I feel about XP. If my current OS breaks down, XP will definitely be my next one.

One complaint: I am not happy about the registration system. I don't mind registering by email or phone, but I don't like it that Microsoft has built the OS to require re-registration under certain conditions. So that's definitely a concern of mine. I don't feel like rewarding that design decision on Microsoft's part with my money at this point.

I'm sure I'll be using some version of XP someday, though perhaps it may be whatever new version Microsoft has planned for 2002. Will you current XP users spend $100 for a new Microsoft OS next year if they put one out?

Luckily I do not have to put up with this product activation bullshit since I have a corporate Windows XP Pro that does not require it.

Even so I am still not going to install this at home.

Mark (please don your flame-retardent gear now, kthx),

um.......sorry, but i've got WinXP installed on a couple machines here now, and it not once has required me to register -jack shit- with microsoft, god (if there is such a thing), your fairy god editor, or anything of the sort.

yes, during the installation, it asks if you would like to register, but it doesn't force you to do so.. and, in fact, while it definately mentions registration during the installation, i cannot find any means to register it via my start menus/control panels (just looked).. maybe i'm blind?

so, please, until you've tried it and deplored it and hated it's very virtue like everything else that is microsoft (and then turn around and use it like a crack-addicted whore), stop pawning off your hatred of microsoft (or whatever it is they did to you during that abduction) on your factually-incorrect hearsay until you have used it, so that you have a basis of fact for your complaint?

(breath in, slowly, mike)

...and by the way, it's product activation that comes unglued by nerds who toss in/throw out new hardware every other day. i doubt you'd ever see this yourself- and since you don't run it, i guess you never will. :)

- mike - have a nice day..now where's my coffee? -

I decided to upgrade to XP because of the number of Me crashes I've had doing serious work stuff with Acrobat, PageMaker, etc., under Me. I bought a new notebook that shipped with XP and it's crashed exactly once, due to a bad driver install. It's worth it to me to have fewer crash hassles.

Also, because the XP boot drive is on an add-on ATA133 controller, I can shift back to my old Me drive just by changing the boot priority in the BIOS. No boot managers to deal with, etc. Sweet!

Mike,

How are we supposed to take the opinions of someone who's not intested in Civ III seriously? :)

Denny,

bah! if it'll make you feel better about my opinions, you are free to send me a copy of Civ3. :P

- mike - opinion needed coffee -

"so, please, until you've tried it and deplored it and hated it's very virtue like everything else that is microsoft (and then turn around and use it like a crack-addicted whore), stop pawning off your hatred of microsoft (or whatever it is they did to you during that abduction) on your factually-incorrect hearsay until you have used it, so that you have a basis of fact for your complaint?"

Cute. All I said was that I didn't want to spend $99 to upgrade when I have an OS that works fine for me and that the product activation, which I've read about in numerous articles, bothers me. How you turn that into a hatred of Microsoft is beyond me.

C'mon, Mark - anyone who doesn't immediately upgrade to XP hates Microsoft. Whether you feel like you need it or not.

As for me, I really hate everything about Toyota, I bash their every move. I spew voluminous venom towards them. After all, I decided that our year old Sienna minivan does everything we need, and while there are a couple of things that look cool in the new one, there's also a couple of items about it I don't care for. I even told a couple of friends about the new features I didn't like, and that I just didn't think it was worth spending the money to replace my current car. They immediately realized that I was a manic Toyota basher.

Sheesh.

Yeah, leave Mark alone. Although it is awfully Wumpusian of him to chime in on EVERY single XP thread. Nobody asked him to upgrade!

---

Quote:

...and by the way, it's product activation that comes unglued by nerds who toss in/throw out new hardware every other day.

---

We're working on converting all of your work computers (roughly 3,000+) from NT to XP right now, so we have been addressing many concerns with the Activation process.

You are allowed to upgrade 3 pieces of hardware before it requires you to call Microsoft and tell them what's going on, so don't do any major upgrades:

If you upgrade the RAM, get a new harddrive, upgrade your CPU, and change network cards, you will have to call Microsoft or XP will fail to work at all.

The activation records an abstract number in Microsoft's database. Supposedly this number can not be reversed to see your hardware information, so Microsoft isn't technically recording your information.

Software is not read at all, so you can change drivers, switch from XP server to Novell, etc... without triggering the activation process.

Oh, and I won't be upgrading at home for at least 3 months. Too many manufacturers are behind the times with their drivers right now. I don't want to lose 20% of my performance while Creative and nVidia tweak their drivers to perform as well with XP as they do with 98SE. Besides, I'm used to 98 and currently have no problems with it. I rarely crash, freeze up, or have unexplained slowdowns. There is no insentive for me to upgrade to XP. Once we get my system here at work set up with XP and I learn the ins and outs, perhaps I'll like it better and install it at home, but I'm not willing to spend $199+ (sorry, I will never buy an Upgrade version again after getting screwed going from 95 to 98) to find out that I get nothing out of it.

"If you upgrade the RAM, get a new harddrive, upgrade your CPU, and change network cards, you will have to call Microsoft or XP will fail to work at all."

Ok, fair enough, though there better not be any waiting on hold... What happens if you do one of each of those in sequence over say 6 months?

Lee, you could have kept all of your programs etc. by doing this amazingly slick thing called a repair install with WinXP. I did 2 of them with motherboard/cpu swaps and it worked like a charm. You install like you normally would skip the first time you see the repair option then once you choose the partition you want it installed on pick repair there. I saw a guide for it somewhere on the net. Do a Google search and you will find it. It takes about the same time as a regular install but leaves all of your programs pretty much intact. It is a far cry from a full wipe and reinstall.

BTW, I believe you can do this in Win2k as well.

David, just scanned back through this thread and I too did a 98SE to WinXP upgrade for my wife and it worked like a charm.

Too late now, Rob, but I'll keep it in mind for the future. :-) I did have some lingering issues from my upgrade installation (Win2K SP1->XP RC1->XP RC2->XP Pro final), such as System Restore exploding any time I got near its settings pages. Since I just did the big hardware upgrade, I decided to do a wipe and go for maximum stability and minimal leftover junk. :-)

"What happens if you do one of each of those in sequence over say 6 months?"

Apparently, and this is just going by what my PC gurus here are telling me, when you do a fresh install and activation of XP, that is when it checks the config. So if you replaced all 4 things over 6 months and then had to do a reinstall of the OS, it would force a CS call to Microsoft. However, if you replaced/changed 4 things but didn't have to do a reinstall, you wouldn't have to call MS until you did your next reinstall.

Next I think I'll ask them what happens if you do a reinstall after each individual change. Not sure if it saves your last known config or your first known config as the baseline for checking.

"Besides, I'm used to 98 and currently have no problems with it. I rarely crash, freeze up, or have unexplained slowdowns. There is no insentive for me to upgrade to XP."

But there was for me as a sucker Windows ME owner. That thing was terminally crashing on me five times or more a day when I would do simple things like click on a link in I.E. Since clean installing Windows XP, I don't hard crash, and applications rarely screw up on me where they once did. For instance, Half-Life/TFC/Counter-Strike used to have numerous glitches for me, where the screen resolution would screw up and the screen would semi-garble after signing off of a multiplayer game, etc. That never happens to me in XP anymore. All this adds up to an amazing upgrade in my standard of (computer) living. Much less cursing at the screen.

'We're working on converting all of your work computers (roughly 3,000+) from NT to XP right now'

Eh? Why not just install 2000 Professional?

"If you upgrade the RAM, get a new harddrive, upgrade your CPU, and change network cards, you will have to call Microsoft or XP will fail to work at all."

Actually I don't think that's entirely true--you would have to call for activation, but XP will function in the meantime, albeit only for one month (or something like that).

We have it on our demo machine, which Jason uses for hardware testing. He swaps hardware out on a weekly (sometimes hourly) basis in that machine, and reinstalls Windows relatively often. The solution--don't activate at all. As long as you don't go more than a month before reinstalling, you're fine.

The solution is to get your hands on the coporate version and cease worrying about activation at all.

"Eh? Why not just install 2000 Professional?"

One word: Money. Microsoft is giving us a huge deal on XP as compared to what they were offering for Win2k.

I can't even pretend to understand the difference between the two OS's that would convince them to go to XP instead of Win2k. I know one of the considerations was that Win2k is currently having a cow running MicroFocus COBOL, which is one of the main things out developers run.

The sad thing is that we're paying $99-199 to upgrade because (ooh) the product doesn't fail four times a day.

If operating systems were like cars, TVs, or other consumer products, Bill G would have to offer us a free upgrade due to the original product's lemon performance.

Oooo...MicroBogus COBOL...a fan favorite where I work.

--Dave

Ah, pricing makes sense. I can't imagine why they're so eager to get you using XP instead, though.

*COBOL*? CO-BOL?

I'll just pretend this discussion never happened.

Jim, did the discount XP deal Microsoft offered include a provision that you have to upgrade XP when they tell you to? That was one of the weird corporate deals MS was trying to push that was getting a lot of flak. Just wondering if MS backed off of that.

We have a couple of upgrade requirements that Microsoft slapped on us that our purchase department should have fought against.

We are required to upgrade all our systems from Officer 97 to the next version of Office MS releases. We are required to upgrade all versions of IE to IE6.0 (you know, the one without Netscape plugin or Java support). They also tried to bully us into switching all our C++ and Visual Studios licenses to the new .Net and C# (C-Sharp) versions but Internal PC R&D vetoed that one as being completely incompatible with our current archetecture.

As for requiring us to upgrade XP, I haven't heard anything about that coming through, so I think we negotiated around that one. Who knows though, our negotiators really suck so we probably agreed to enough things that Microsoft is making out like a bandit.

Hehe, okie, I got curious to I talked to one of the PC R&D guys to find out exactly what pressure they put on us to go to XP instead of staying at NT 4.0 or going to Win2k.

We were given until June 2002 to upgrade to WinXP. Failure to upgrade before WinXP would result in a renegotiation of all current license contracts when they came up (we renew our licenses every year with MS, so no doubt it was around June 2002). Instead of getting our norma corporate pricing, we would have had to pay for each individual license, which would have cost nearly triple the current costs. Also, we were told that failure to upgrade would mean that ALL future Microsoft purchases would cost us full retail price. Buying OfficeXP? You're paying $350 per copy instead of the standard corporate bulk price (not sure what that bulk price is, but it's significantly less).

When we voiced interest in going to Win2k instead of XP, the same result ensued. We would be paying full retail for each license of Win2k AND we would have to pay a yearly maintanence fee. Our corporate versions of MSDN would be revoked because "they would not be compatible with the current archetecture Microsoft is working with".

Essentially it sounds like we had absolutely no choice on how we would go. It was either XP or never buy another Microsoft product. We would have been stuck at the current versions of Microsoft forever, getting no service packs, security upgrades, or updated MSDN help files.

Oh, and yes, we are required to pay an annual XP "upgrade" fee which gives us access to everything else

'They also tried to bully us into switching all our C++ and Visual Studios licenses to the new .Net and C# (C-Sharp) versions but Internal PC R&D vetoed that one as being completely incompatible with our current archetecture.'

I've been using the RC1 beta, and there's nothing you can do in VS6 that you can't do in VSN. It's a lot nicer. Then again, they probably wanted more money.

'Essentially it sounds like we had absolutely no choice on how we would go. It was either XP or never buy another Microsoft product. We would have been stuck at the current versions of Microsoft forever, getting no service packs, security upgrades, or updated MSDN help files.'

Bastards.

Not much we can do about it. They are a monopoly, plain and simple. They can hold things over our heads and the only thing we can do is smile and say Thank You.

Only power this company has over MS is that we have a few non-Microsoft solutions for our other situations. We can use Oracle instead of Access (quick joke: Oracle spelled backwards in El Caro, which is Spanish for "The expensive one"), Java instead of VB, etc... That gives us a small amount of negotiating potential that gets us a few deals. Still, those options are slowly dwindling; we can't use Java on the Web since it isn't supported in IE 6.0 now, so we're forced into ASP.

To go back to your summary... Bastards

"Essentially it sounds like we had absolutely no choice on how we would go. It was either XP or never buy another Microsoft product. We would have been stuck at the current versions of Microsoft forever, getting no service packs, security upgrades, or updated MSDN help files."

Gee, what a choice. The best Microsoft OS ever released for less money, or one of the earlier, weaker versions for more money? BASTARDS!

Lemme see. Porsche Boxster for $20k, or Hyundai Elantra for $30k? Boy, tough spot you guys got put in there.

I know corporations just hate to adopt anything other than five year old, "proven" applications. That's why I'm typing this from NT 4.0 SP6. And it sucks ass. So pardon me if I have little sympathy for you guys. You're better off with a new OS now than 5 years down the line limping along with 2k.

'You're better off with a new OS now than 5 years down the line limping along with 2k.'

Yes, XP is definitely the superior technical product. Sheesh.

---

Quote:

I know corporations just hate to adopt anything other than five year old, "proven" applications. That's why I'm typing this from NT 4.0 SP6. And it sucks ass. So pardon me if I have little sympathy for you guys. You're better off with a new OS now than 5 years down the line limping along with 2k.

---

Perhaps it's superior, but we are being forced into it. We wanted to stay with NT 4.0 because, well, we'll entrenched in it. But along comes Microsoft and says "June 2002...or else".

For a credit card processing company, we don't need anything more powerful than NT 4.0. We're running PIII-800's with 256MB RAM and 20 gig HDs are our standard systems, so it's not like we're butting up against the point where NT can't take advantage of the full system resources.

We now have to upgrade every system and every NT server. Since Java was the web language of choice here, we also have to upgrade every app to ASP.

The only reason we even glanced at going to Win2k was because Microsoft said we had to move off of NT 4.0.

So our choices now are:

My current perfectly running car for $0 or a Porsche Boxster for $20k, plus $10k of non-optional upgrades and 2k for driving lessons. Problem is, no more spare parts for the current car and the dealer is threatening to slash the tires.

"Yes, XP is definitely the superior technical product. Sheesh."

2k isn't chopped liver, but why bother with the pain of an upgrade if you don't go with the latest and greatest? That way you can put off the next upgrade EVEN LONGER. It makes financial and practical sense.

"For a credit card processing company, we don't need anything more powerful than NT 4.0. We're running PIII-800's with 256MB RAM and 20 gig HDs are our standard systems, so it's not like we're butting up against the point where NT can't take advantage of the full system resources."

Then don't upgrade. If everything's running so gosh-darned great, what difference would it make to get official support or not? It's not like MS is busting their ass supporting NT 4.0 for the last two years, so I can't imagine how different the next six would be.

"We now have to upgrade every system and every NT server. Since Java was the web language of choice here, we also have to upgrade every app to ASP."

You're on crack. Upgrade every app to ASP? Yeah, you could do that, or you could just install the free Java runtimes. Hmm. Now which makes more sense.. lemme see..

"The only reason we even glanced at going to Win2k was because Microsoft said we had to move off of NT 4.0."

I can only imagine the hand-wringing that went on when you guys switched from DOS and Windows 3.1. I despise this "change is bad" attitude. I really do. I think if some people had their way, everything would stay the same for the next hundred years.

'2k isn't chopped liver, but why bother with the pain of an upgrade if you don't go with the latest and greatest? That way you can put off the next upgrade EVEN LONGER. It makes financial and practical sense.'

What on earth are you talking about, Jeff? Download the MS Platform SDK and look at the function reference. About half the API isn't supported on XP. 2k is the technically superior product for development use (I'm assuming that's what his business needs these for, not secretaries doing Word).

"Gee, what a choice. The best Microsoft OS ever released for less money, or one of the earlier, weaker versions for more money? BASTARDS!"

The problem isn't going to XP. It's being forced into a program where Microsoft essentially forces you to upgrade when they tell you to if you want to continue getting a corporate discount.

Microsoft can only do this because they have a de facto monopoly.

I agree with Jeff's underlying sentiment. If everything is great today on NT4, then why upgrade? We're not rushing to 2000 or XP where I work simply because...we don't have to. There's a few apps we have that don't like either OS and so we are sticking with NT on the desktop for now.

What I don't understand is that, as an employee of said company, you'd have a problem with the upgrade? You're not paying for it...enjoy it! I'm going to be stuck supporting NT for another two or three years at least. Worse, they want to move Linux into as many areas as possible after that. Fucking retail companies...they'd never upgrade anything if stuff didn't just break down and cry after ten years of throwing more development on top of it.

To top it off, IBM is jamming "LINUX IS FREE" down everyone's throats. Yeah...it's free alright. Free until you see the outrageous amount of money and time lost in support costs.

--Dave

'To top it off, IBM is jamming "LINUX IS FREE" down everyone's throats. Yeah...it's free alright. Free until you see the outrageous amount of money and time lost in support costs.'

Details, details. Also, theoretically, when the company does something stupid that reduces the pool for your raise. Not that it's really possible to get a significant raise without switching jobs in high-tech anymore, apparently, but hey.

Seriously...what part of high tech are you thinking about when you talk about getting raises? Significant raises only seem to come with threats of leaving (if you're lucky) or just up and leaving your job for a better paying one.

This is especially true in retail IT despite the business' reliance on IT for just about everything short of the products on the shelves.

--Dave

Isn't that what he said? You have to switch jobs to get a decent raise...That's how I interpreted it...

Um, yeah, that's what I meant. Admittedly, I'm only going off the experience of two post-college jobs, but a company-wide cap on raises of measly 3% seems to be the norm. Stupid industry.

On a related note, someone in Seattle hire me already. C++ yahoo, laid off last month, blah blah blah.

At my company we average 2-4% increases each year. I have been here 7 years so it has increased to a comfortable level. Many of my workmates who left my current employer are now out of a job and trying to get back in. Of course we have put a freeze on hiring to preserve current jobs.

Not a nice time to be looking for work. How do you survive in the meantime Jason ?

I think average around here -- though I haven't been here long enough to absolutely define "average" is about 6%, in the travel industry. (We're not exactly IT, but we're about as close as you can get without actually qualifying...)

I was agreeing with him...sheesh...

--Dave

Sorry!

Yeah, okay, I can see it now. My bad.

"Then don't upgrade. If everything's running so gosh-darned great, what difference would it make to get official support or not?"

I'm guessing you don't work for a Fortune 500 company. There is never an option to stagnate your system. Yes, if it was just them saying "Stay with NT 4.0 and we won't support you" then we would probably stay where we are. Instead, they're saying "Stay with NT 4.0 and you have to pay full price for every Microsoft product you buy from here on out". That might not be a big deal if you work in a shop with 5 programmers and 10 support personel, but this company has over 1400 programmers and over 1600 support personel (sales, secretaries, etc). You start paying 60% more for the next Office upgrade and you're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars.

I really do wish we could install the Java plugin here, but they decided to just rewrite all the Java apps. Why? 2 very dumb reasons. 1) They are afraid that every time we get a new version or SP of IE, it will disable the latest Java plugin, causing downtime that isn't really an option. 2) Our legal department doesn't allow us to install freeware. Stupid as it sounds, we have to set up pay and support contracts with every company that we install software from. We paid a corporate license fee for Flash, Quicktime, PFE (a freeware context sensitive programming enviornment for Java, REXX, Perl, and a few other things), etc. I'm not a legal guy, so don't ask me to explain why this is.

Unfortunatly, First Data is entrenched in Microsoft archetecture or we wouldn't be in this kind of position.

Oh, and yes, it was a bitch moving to NT 4.0. We went from dumb terminals to OS2 to NT 4.0 (moved off of OS2 4 years ago). Each change requires acceptance testing of all software on the system, setting up new servers, training everyone in the company, and just the time and effort to install it on all the systems. This isn't Joe Friday walking down to Best Buy, picking up a copy of XP and installing it after work. Making any large scope archetecture change takes months and, in a case like this, millions of dollars (no, I'm not exagerating. Once software cost, training costs, and charge backs for employee down time are figured, it's a huge chunk of change).

Uh Jim, you're sounding pretty elitist here. Whether it's 1600 users or 1/4 that, it's a big job to go to a new OS. We all understand that I think. But with a bigger company, I'm surprised that you'd be so much quicker to move on to a new OS. You've got WAY more people that can offer support, therefore you could support legacy systems longer. Not only that, you're obviously a huge account, why don't they leverage that with a vendor like Microsoft? No balls on the CIO?

Frankly, I'm glad I don't work for a Fortune 500 company. I'm much less likely to have a pink slip handed to me for no apparent reason other than "restructuring". They tend to see employees as people, or at least organic organisms rather than just another nameless cog in a machine.

That said...Retail IT sometimes isn't worth the headaches.

--Dave

'Not a nice time to be looking for work. How do you survive in the meantime Jason ?'

They gave me, Mr. Worked There For One Year, a *month* of severance and vested my stock options. This combined with unemployment can get me by until May or so.

They decided back in March to close the entire Seattle division, so I had plenty of warning. It's pretty amusing to go back to the the college habit of getting up at noon for a few weeks.

"Uh Jim, you're sounding pretty elitist here."

Ummm, I'd much rather work for a small firm. Being one of 1400 programmers means, basically, that you are just a number. They'd fire me tomorrow if it would raise the stock price by $.35. It's not like this is my company.

But the fact is, a small company doesn't have to worry about the cost of Office going from $120 to $320 as much as a large company does. For the small company, that is an extra $5000. For a large company, you're talking $600,000...and that's just one of the products. It's all just scope: as systems get larger, they become harder to handle. It's easy for a 15 member team to say "Fuck Microsoft", but this company just can't do that. It would put us behind the competition curve and we'd lose clients in droves with a couple of years.

As I've been saying, it's First Data's own fault that Microsoft can hold "corporate pricing" like a club. We are 100% in bed with them and we can't say "if you force us to upgrade, we'll take our business elsewhere" because, well, they KNOW we can't do that. They know that very few companies out there can do that. That's why Microsoft has the largest balls around, because they know they have a monopoly. Sure, we could switch to Linux, WordPerfect, and Solaris, but can you imagine how long and how much effort that would take? It's not a viable option. We'd lose every client and go bankrupt long before we got to the point where we could be up to speed again.

And that's not to bring up the point that most software a company needs will only run on a Windows enviornment.

Any company with this much control and market share can pretty well make any demand they choose.

Lets take, for example, the mail system. What if the U.S. Mail suddenly said "You have to pay $300 to buy a new mailbox or we won't deliver mail to you". Guess what, you're paying $300. You have to. It isn't fair, but you don't have a choice. And if you make too much noise about it, maybe they'll just choose not to deliver your mail anyway. Sure, you could have your mail delivered by FedEx, but how many bills would be late while you tracked them all down and had the shipping changed? How many firms will only mail through the US Mail system?

Eventually you just have to bite the pillow and take it.

"Eventually you just have to bite the pillow and take it."

Wasn't that going to be an ad slogan for Daikatana?

"It's easy for a 15 member team to say "Fuck Microsoft", but this company just can't do that. It would put us behind the competition curve and we'd lose clients in droves with a couple of years."

With goofball decisions like your Java conversion, I'm surprised you're in business at all.

But seriously. You might not switch wholesale, but nothing is stopping you guys from seeding the ground with pilot projects for Linux, Mac, Solaris, or whatever options seem more appealing than Microsoft. Rather than bitch about it, do something about it. Bill Gates isn't there holding a gun to your collective heads forcing you to use MS products for every single thing you do. Branch out.

"As I've been saying, it's First Data's own fault that Microsoft can hold "corporate pricing" like a club. We are 100% in bed with them and we can't say "if you force us to upgrade, we'll take our business elsewhere" because, well, they KNOW we can't do that. They know that very few companies out there can do that. That's why Microsoft has the largest balls around, because they know they have a monopoly. Sure, we could switch to Linux, WordPerfect, and Solaris, but can you imagine how long and how much effort that would take? It's not a viable option. We'd lose every client and go bankrupt long before we got to the point where we could be up to speed again."

We can make the same argument about a business based on Sun's Solaris OS and specialized hardware, Oracle's database software, specific accounting packages, etc. Happens all the time. This isn't just a Microsoft phenomenon, in case you hadn't noticed. There is no mythical magical interop layer for all software. Change is painful once you commit; you're basically married.

Also on the job market

http://wise-ebusiness.com/images/job_market.gif