Yeah, this looks less Star Wars and more The Incredibles.

The research has dropped 15 vulnerabilities? What does that mean? They did have the vulnerabilities but have now discarded them?

If you want your data to be secured then the only way really is to run a server yourself.

Yes, but in those days of 5 megabyte hard disks you probably had a lot of your "information" in physical form - photos, records, letters, CDs, etc, so the consequences of losing that 5MB wouldn't be all that serious.

Not so common today.

0) RAID1/10 first so that if a disk fails you don't need to go to your actual backups and lose a days work[1].

[1] (Lost work since time of last backup) + (Time to install new disk) + (Time to reinstall / retrieve from backup)

I agree, but to be fair in this case it appears to me inline the same as an article. I don't mind it that much though it will probably result in fewer votes on any given poll as it is pushed further down by other articles.

Since recycling is the least-best of the three R's, it might be a good time to look at the other two: Reduce, Re-use.

...except you've just lost a day's work. I don't consider that an acceptable loss so I RAID1 all drives on desktop computers (with the nightly backup thing happening too).

Yes, RAID is not a backup, but the point is to reduce the need to call on backups in the first place.

You seem to be under the impression that backward and forward hardware compatibility are easy things:

1) That an arbitrary OS could be expected to run well on hardware made many years in the past and many years in the future, and
2) That arbitrary hardware can easily support ancient software.

Suppose you'd said this about DOS. Microsoft should support it in perpetuity! OK, then, but where are you going to buy a mouse today that supports the hardware ports that DOS knows how to handle (or would you think mouse makers would spend the effort to write MTRACKPAD.SYS so that a new Apple Magic Trackpad would work on it)? And it's not exactly free or cheap for a modern i7 to maintain 100% 8088 compatibility.

Conversely, should iOS 9 be expected to run on an original iPhone, with CPUs and GPUs many times slower, an eighth the RAM, a fraction of the storage, and utterly obsolete in many other ways? Even if the minimal core could be made to run, so many features would have to be stripped out (at great development and testing expense) that it'd be pointless.

There are good reasons for dropping compatibility. Software isn't easily made to scale down to ancient predecessors, and hardware leaves stuff behind regularly - I don't have serial ports or ISA slots on this motherboard. It's not plausible for Apple to carry iOS all the way back to hardware that almost no one is using, and it's not realistic for Microsoft to drag Windows 7 all the way forward to hardware that hasn't even been conceived yet. At some point, you just have to let go.

I fight... for the users.

are you saying XP is better in the enterprise?

Unequivocally yes.

You are high or in some dinosaur industry. If you haven't moved all your PC's off XP yet you are doomed!

I didn't say we were still using XP. My client had to change off XP because Microsoft stopped making security updates for it, not because of any merits of 7. Along with the previously mentioned, we had to deal with a lot of hardware simply not working at all (no 64-bit Windows drivers) and utterly pathetic system recovery. Have you ever had Windows 7 successfully perform a startup repair? Ever? Me neither, though XP managed it all the time.

Who BROWSES a windows network? Not any sort of enterprise. Why would someone do that? The admin sets the drives,. printers, etc you need based on your location and function.

That works for the most commonly used shares (when Windows 7 remembers to mount them, which is about 50% of the time), but for more than a handful of network shares, you browse.

XP is garbage. Its like saying you want to use win98 in these days. If you have modern touch screen devices, you almost have to use windows 8. I find win8 less stable than windows 7 but windows 7 is surely just as stable as windows 2000.

Or as stable as XP perhaps? XP is nothing like 98 and its crash-tastic glory. Who uses touch screens in the Enterprise? And if they do, they're probably doing it on Android or perhaps Apple.

There are a few benefits to 7 of course: Proper 64-bit support is nice for programs that need more than 4GB and a few more CPU registers available if they're compiled right. That does not matter in an enterprise. The printer system is much improved as is the WSUS system. Marginally better driver detection, although a sysprep is still required for basic scenarios such as switching between AHCI and PATA emulated SATA modes. Can't think of much else I'm afraid.

You, sir, win the Internet today.

Yes, and the enterprise desktop is not one of them. I assume you do not work in the corporate sector, otherwise you would know that Windows 7 is a major step backwards.

Multi-domain logins? Sure, so long as you don't mind typing the WHOLE DOMAIN NAME every time you log in for all but one default domain. Domain selector dropdown box? Gone. No problem, just drop in a custom gina. Whoops, that whole ABI is gone.

Okay, let's browse the Windows network. So long as you're happy to wait for ten minutes, it will eventually populate with a flat (yes, FLAT) list of all the computers it can find, which is usually about 20 percent of the actual number of computers on the network. You can group the right pane by Workgroup to attempt to bring some structure to the list, but the left pane is pretty much beyond help.

What an absolute joke.

"Swift" was a generic noun and a generic adjective long before Taylor's ancestors started using it. I've never seen a wild dylan or ran dylanly down a racetrack, though.