Microsoft quietly extends consumer support for Windows 7, Vista

I had lots of bad experiences with Vista, including network speed slowdowns and several file copy/move issues. The hardware was an Acer 5100-5033, which came with Vista Home Premium and was compatible with Aero. By now and after all the Service Packs, Vista may be performing normally, I guess. I stopped using Vista when Windows 7 Beta started. In 2011 my most recent laptop (a very good HP DV7-4267CL) went to repair because of heat issues and I had to use an ancient laptop with 512MB of memory that originally came with Vista Home Basic (I had sold the awful Acer 5100-5033). I didn't take the risk: I installed XP SP3 on it.

 

Forgot about that one. It was an actual issue that didn't really seem to be hardware dependent. There was a hotfix for it that worked fine for me and was released with the first 2 weeks of Vista's release. I don't think they ever rolled that out through Windows Updates though. It was included in SP1.

 

This phenomenon is called the One Hundred Monkey Effect (OHME) which basically describes that as soon as a critical number of people become aware of something (right or wrong), the knowledge somehow instantly spreads to everyone else, a sort of snowballing effect.

 

Yeah, blame the monkeys! LOL

The real question is, would an infinite number of monkeys, using an infinite number of computer keyboards, eventually write Vista Home Premium service pack 2?

 

I'm in that category ... as you can see in my sig, my system's pretty antique, and there's no way it could even try to handle Vista or 7. But it handles XP just fine, and at going on 9 years old it probably won't last even as long as the remaining support period for XP.

So I'll probably do my usual thing, when the time comes get a new system with whatever the then-current Win OS is. Going all the way back to my C-64 (plus floppy drive for it), every time I've needed to replace my system I've gotten much more computer for about the same price as the old one -- probably a little cheaper, even, allowing for the inflationary value of the dollar.

 

There again, I quite liked XP when it first came out. I have a computer running XP that isn't online at the moment as I am having some WiFi problems with it. I am considering running Ubuntu (or some other Nix flavour) when I get around to it. That could be some time though.