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Comment by goalieca | Hacker News Reader

The thing that kills me is that XP is basically 10 years old now. It still "adds a new device" every time i plug in a usb key.

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It does that because the alternative is even worse: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2004/11/10/25504...

Why should this change? Microsoft has invested billions in Vista and Windows 7. It's time to upgrade. Supporting all the legacy costs Microsoft money that can be better spent on future enhancements.

    Microsoft has invested billions in Vista and Windows 7.
    It's time to upgrade

Non-sequiter.

You can buy support for legacy versions of VMS, Unix and OS/2.

    Supporting all the legacy costs Microsoft money that
    can be better spent on future enhancements.

It would be definitely be cost-effective to sell Windows XP support.

The reason for withdrawing XP support are strategic, not cost-oriented (nor customer-oriented!!)

Technically that's the fault of the hardware vendor for not including a valid serial # in the device's EEPROM. Did they change the behavior in later Windows versions?

no, they didn't. vista and 7 still have exactly the same behaviour as XP for initializing a new device, they just do a better job of hiding it from the users.

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