The international movement to save endangered operating systems (aka Windows XP) has gained supporters in unlikely quarters. Cringester J. C. reports: Just got a call from my Dell rep: Dell will provide XP on business class computers (Latitude and Optiplex) through 2011 at no extra cost. The media kit for Vista will be supplied to those who want it. Vostro gets the same deal at a $50.00 premium. Note: this carri The international movement to save endangered operating systems (aka Windows XP) has gained supporters in unlikely quarters. Cringester J. C. reports: Just got a call from my Dell rep: Dell will provide XP on business class computers (Latitude and Optiplex) through 2011 at no extra cost. The media kit for Vista will be supplied to those who want it. Vostro gets the same deal at a $50.00 premium. Note: this carries beyond the release date for Windows 7, allowing a reasonable time to see what that is like. Even The Mad Ballmer is backing off his Use Vista or Die stance. According to The Register, the chair-flingin’ CEO had this to say to the Redmond faithful at Microsoft’s Most Valuable Professionals event last week in Seattle: “We have a lot of customers that are choosing to stay with Windows XP, and as long as those are both important options, we will be sensitive, and we will listen, and we will hear that…..I got a piece of mail from a customer the other day that talked about not being able to get XP anymore, and we responded: XP is still available. And I know we’re going to continue to get feedback from people on how long XP should be available. We’ve got some opinions on that.” It is instructive to remember, however, that when XP arrived at the PC party it was greeted like a turd in the punchbowl. Infoworld’s review of XP published on October 26, 2001, had this to say: HOPELESS OPTIMISM must be a fundamental part of human nature, because we want to believe that new operating systems truly represent an improvement on their predecessors. It’s easy to point to certain features in a new OS as examples of progress, but end-users often find that a new OS performs like molasses compared to the version they were using…..Unfortunately, Microsoft’s Windows XP appears to be maintaining that tradition …Our tests of the multitasking capabilities of Windows XP and Windows 2000 demonstrated that under the same heavy load on identical hardware, Windows 2000 significantly outperformed Windows XP. In the most extreme scenario, our Windows XP system took nearly twice as long to complete a workload as did the Windows 2000 client. The review doesn’t touch on XP’s brain-dead approach to security, which didn’t even start to go away until Service Pack 2 was released in August 2004 — nearly three years after XP debuted. So is all this Visa hand-wringing for nought? Maybe in three years we’ll be singing its praises. (Wait, did a pig just fly by my window?) But what’s really dull-witted is the sudden longing for Windows 7, as if next time around, Microsoft will somehow finally — finally! — get it right. Hopeless optimism indeed. Technorati Tags: microsoft,vista,windows xp,ballmer,flying pigs,windows 7Got hot tips or flying pigs? Land them below (hopefully the comments feature is now fixed) or email them to me direct — cringe (at) infworld (dot) com. Swank swag awaits top tipsters. Think you’ve got the right stuff to pass our tech quizzes? They’re not as easy as they look: • The InfoWorld News Quiz • Test Your Geek IQ • Test Your Network Security IQ Software DevelopmentSmall and Medium Business