jay-h (2/18/2014)
Markus (2/17/2014)
Funny this article comes up. Saturday I was at my parents house and my Mom said look at this message I am getting on our PC.... she fires up the PC and low and behold it is Windows XP. I could have swore when we upgraded her from Windows ME it was to Vista.... yikes... so.... Sunday I ordered her a new PC with Windows 7. I don't want to try and teach an 80 year old how to use Win8 when i don't even have it myself. So, there will be one less XP license being used in a week or so... LOLI understand their annoyance. Imagine being told your 6 year old car, or washer, or furnace had to be replaced, not because it no longer worked, but because the manufacturer decided it was not good enough and decided you need to buy the newest one.
Frankly it's annoying as hell.
I can understand both sides of it really... the thing is a furnace, washer, car doesn't run completely on software that needs to be patched every single month. If Microsoft kept supporting every single operating system forever they would have a nightmare on their hands and it would be quite expensive for them to write a patch for each different operating system. So, it is a little different than a mechanical product sitting in your kitchen.
The thing is with an appliance when it gets to 9+ years half the time when a part goes bad it is cheaper to buy a new product than the part.... our Fridge compressor died at 8 years old... new fridge was cheaper than compressor... and it was 40% more energy efficient... dishwasher the same thing.... the heat exchanger on our furnace died and we got a new furnace that was 17% more efficient because it was cheaper than replacing the heat exchanger in the old one.