Hi.

I agree, mac OS X is a great OS, even better than XP though XP still and always will be my favorite Windows OS.
I agree about macintalk.
Apple or who ever makes those voices has done some tweaking and Alex as well as the other male and female voices sound really crackely and emphasize some words strangely.
For instance, try turning VoiceOver off on a mac and listen to how Alex says VoiceOver off.
Well, that may change in iOS 8, since from what I've heard, Alex may finally be somewhat fixed. I miss Snow Leopard. It was the first mac OS I had and Alex was actually pretty good.
I still don't know why they decided it was necessary to destroy the macintalk voices in Lion and higher.

I still have a old EMachine, which is no longer made running with 512 megs of ram, and a 80 gig western digital hard drive with windows xp home addition. I plan to keep xp on there as long as it lives.

Indeed, and American English too. While I've of course grown used to it, I would doubtless like to see a British English voice with the same high quality as Alex, for when the situation demands. Right now, quality is the single biggest reason to use Alex, and coming over from Daniel it's just wonderful.

I see my topic is still getting some love, good to see. One thing i noticed through a virtual machine i was playing with was that you can still browse the net with firefox and windows 2000. This is interesting to me because it really drives the point home that even though a version of windows isn't officialy getting updates any more, it doesn't mean you still can't be productive with it. Microsoft would have you believe otherwise, telling you that you are at extreme risk of security problems like viruses and being hacked. I would simply counter that by saying, sure, if your ignorant, you can certainly be hacked. If your the type of person to go in to the depths of the internet to some odd ball torrent sites, or who knows where, i would think that the risk would be greater than if you only did some day to day browsing like going to audio games .net. I wouldn't advise doing your banking or online shopping with an unsupported version of windows, but fear not, you can still be pretty productive i'm sure, even with windows 2000 or xp in the case of this topic. I also have done this with windows mobile 6.1, even finding a workaround to play flash videos. Oh, and also one more thing, i found a site that seems to be a corner of the world who loves and thinks that windows 98 SE is the best thing since sliced bread. Someone even devised some type of kernel update allowing a windows 98 user to view modern web pages. It's funny, because it goes against everything that software giants would have you believe, yet, people still love there dinosaur computers, and use them day to day.

Latest updates didn't appear for XP with the POSReady hack. Perhaps M$ caught wind?

Just to bring this back once again to say that i think the POSE-ready updates still work, and from what i can tell, haven't broke my installation of XP on this old desktop. While i primarily keep it around because the hardware still works great, and it's also a good gaming box, for the occasional web browsing the machine does do, i haven't had a single issue. Now when the updates were first being used around the time the hack was discovered, the desktop would hang, but that is fixed now it seems.

POSReady updates still work in my XP VM.

Dropbox drops support, and so does Chrome.

That leaves Firefox, the single-process browser. And what happens when that moves to a multi-process model, eh?

The end days are near, friends ...

Yep, basically what Chris said.

Win7 is the new XP basically because people are sticking with the worst of a bad bunch. I agree, Vista service pack 2. Better to move to Win8.1 with Classic Shell; then you can get everything Windows has to offer. Only it's still Windows ...

XP is old and obsolete, but it still works. It won't die, because for a lot of people it still manages to tick all the boxes. All these intentional XP refuseniks have simply concluded that there is nothing in yonder Windows upgrade direction. Developers are tired of supporting XP's antiquated APIs, and are simply forcibly removing support for it, following Google's lead. I don't blame them at all, but given that XP is still filling a need for some people, I'd say it was rather unfortunate. I wonder how long Firefox will hold out.

Apple obsolete operating systems faster because back-compatibility isn't the same priority it is in the WinTel world. Yes, there were more releases, and yes, those releases were tied to certain hardware, at the earliest, which means that new hardware pushes you onto a new release. But ultimately, Apple are simply quite ruthless in dropping obsolete software. They don't want to be lumbered with supporting it. In the case of OS X (or MacOS) that's not such a big deal because Apple doesn't change everything, again, every five minutes. But it also means that if your hardware is no longer supportable with newer software due to an architecture change, well, you're SOL. It is here that Windows, with its ever-lasting compatibility, comes in handy. Or did--it's not clear to me that contemporary Windows is, in fact, so different from OS X, anyway.

Oh yeah! I often wish that XP was still the defacto standard version of Windows. Even better would be Windows 2000! That was a lean and mean operating system. It had no eye or ear candy, was super stable, could play games, and was very fast, and could fit on half a CD and only needed 256MB to run.

Even before I lost my vision I didn't like all the eye candy Microsoft was putting in Windows. To me a computer is a tool, it doesn't need to win any beauty contests, it just needs to be functional. So starting with Windows XP almost the first thing I do after installing Windows is to set the theme to Windows Classic. In XP I even whent so far as to disable the theme service after setting the theme to Windows Classic so the theme couldn't be changed. If it had been possible, I'd have removed all the theme crap.

Something I discovered is that the code base that makes up Windows hasn't really gotten that much larger since Windows XP, the reason Windows Vista and later need a DVD instead of a CD as XP and earlier could fit on is because of the giggabytes of graphics and audio data that is needed to support the newer skinned user interfaces full of useless eye and ear candy.

As far as I'm concerned,, all that eye and ear candy is just a useless and shameful waste of processor power.

Yeah, Haswell or better will stop being supported in 2017, I think it is. So people wishing to stay on 7/8/8.1 had better get themselves rigs with Broadwell or less if they wish to keep running those OSs until 2020 (for 7) and 2023 (for 8.1).

Yep, Win2000 was all kinds of awesome. It didn't have the best hardware compatibility record, but my God, fast, stable, and kicked arse all the time. It was, after all, a professional workstation operating system--what more is there to say, really? When Windows XP came out, my old Pentium II 400 MHz struggled to run it, but because the screen readers now all supported the NT family, it became feasible for me to downgrade to 2K, which I duly did. That old machine was a server from that day, in 2001, to 2012 when I had to forcibly retire it, running Linux. Happy days, happy days ...

I suppose there is one saving grace: Windows 8 actually toned down the processor usage, to accommodate mobile devices, but trimming the window management to fit with the flat ethic. All the Win7 and Vista users got into a tizzy because they couldn't see through windows any more. FFS. But it was not and will never be a match for the pro workstations.

Windows 8.1? No thanks. If I upgrade past Windows 7, I'll go to Windows 10. While wishing I could go back to Windows XP or even Windows 2000!

windows10 is great! its very fast like xp. the computer's fan hardly runs. it takes up about 12gigs for a clean install. and if you cloan your old magnetic platter hard drive to a solid state drive ssd 250gig ssd for $60 and $5 for usb to sata cable... well if you do that your computer will run super super fast!