Topic: depreciation and formal release schedule?

well, msft is pretty much giving away win7pro and office 2010 to companies who are 'stuck' on XP.

Is the writing on the wall?

Would it be useful for the DP crowd to formally set a depreciation schedule (Oct 2010??) and a fixed release schedule (every two months?) so that people can plan and eventually shift their efforts to Win7 driver packs full time?

I have some ideas along these lines but it need a serious community discussion.

Re: depreciation and formal release schedule?

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Well, I wouldn't say they're giving them away. wink
But you're right that we should taper off (NOT drop) support for nt5-based OS's and concentrate all our firepower on nt6-based OS's.

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Re: depreciation and formal release schedule?

I don't think we need to make it "official" wink

There is No doubt that nt5 is the past and nt6 is the future.

Muiz has been going it alone on the NT6 packs I'm sure he will welcome all to help him just as we welcome all to help with the NT5 packs - however people are not beating a path to either door sad.

I plan to implement nt6 support to base short term and a group of us including Siginet are pursuing a more robust tool targeted at win 7 as we speak.

So we don't really need to etch anything in stone. A natural progression of things will take us in the direction you suggest and is in fact in the works already!

We can't and won't set a schedual - we are volunteers not employees -
We never know when, or if, we will have time so we just take what we get when we can.
Unless you know some people who want to roll up thier sleeves and dig in?


PS I really, Really like the way you think!!!

Last edited by OverFlow (2010-01-06 00:02:04)

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Re: depreciation and formal release schedule?

I think one major thing is that driver support is so much better in Windows 7 than it was in XP.
AHCI drivers are supplied out of the box, so you only need TM drivers for a couple of exotic or RAID controllers.
The only other important thing is LAN or WLAN drivers; after that, WIndows Update will fetch drivers for almost all devices from the net, cutting down time for searching for and manually installing drivers A LOT!

Of course, it would still be better to have them right on the DVD (saves bandwidth, makes installing faster, prevents redundancy for lots of similar systems), but the pressure isn't as strong anymore and the drivers supplied with WU.com (that was present on XP, too!) are of good quality all around (not so much with XP, unfortunately).

I'm not saying there is no need, but it's way less critical on 7 than it ever was on XP, so don't think we should sweat it, if you know what I mean smile