Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 12 May 2008 19:42
Opinion and Analysis
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The reports that Service Pack 3 for Windows XP is causing problems for
users are flooding in. Has Microsoft lost control of the software
writing process and compatibility with the widest range of hardware?
If there’s one thing that Microsoft has done well over the years, it has been in writing operating systems that have worked well on the vast majority of hardware out there.
Yes, hardware manufacturers have needed to write drivers so that their add-on hardware would work with computers running different versions of Windows.
But with Microsoft’s Windows operating system installed on the vast majority of the world’s computers, those drivers have come in large numbers – even for Microsoft’s latest OS, Windows Vista.
Drivers were slower in coming for Vista than any previous version of Windows. But there are more Vista compatible drivers than ever these days, and Windows XP along with Vista still power most people’s computing experiences, despite the rise and rise of Mac OS X and Linux operating systems, with the most well known being Ubuntu.
But when it comes to Windows XP, an operating system that is seven years old and is installed on computers in the tens, if not hundreds of millions.
SP3 updates Windows XP with better security and lots of bug fixes, and, like Vista SP1, went through one of the biggest beta testing programs ever.
But the mounting evidence suggests that these larger than ever beta programs simply aren’t large enough, and that Microsoft is just not doing enough testing.
If they were, then reports of XP SP3 endless reboots and compatibility problems with some AMD chips just wouldn’t be happening. They’d have been caught earlier in the testing process and fixed before they could affect everyday users who simply want to follow Microsoft’s advice and apply their latest update.
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