Older Machines to Get Retooled Windows

Daniel Pass 21 May, 2005 at 11:53am ET Article published in Tech

Microsoft Corp. is working on a new Windows-based operating system designed to help companies make older machines run better.

The software, code-named Eiger, will look and feel like much like Windows XP and will be equipped with Service Pack 2, a major security upgrade released last summer, said Barry Goffe, a group product manager for Microsoft’s Windows client unit.

The idea behind Eiger came from businesses and school systems that said they couldn’t afford to replace an old fleet of computers but wanted machines running Windows 95, Windows 98 or Windows NT to be more secure and easier to manage.

Still in the early stages of development, Eiger will run a bare-bones set of programs directly from the desktop. The list will include the Internet Explorer browser, Windows Media Center, a firewall and antivirus software.

Most other programs, however, will run off a central server.

The Redmond, Wash.-based software giant has distributed preview copies of Eiger to about two dozen customers, but has not said when the software will be released or how much it will cost.

“Those operating systems we no longer service, so if there’s a security vulnerability, we usually don’t send out security patches,” Goffe said.

Submitted by Kwitko

Source: Associated Press

Comments

21 May 2005 ~ 5:45pm Omega65 Not a terrible idea...if it's Cheap
21 May 2005 ~ 7:18pm GrayFox He he he can't wait to see how much less ram it uses
22 May 2005 ~ 12:17am drasnor

Shorty wrote:

Most other programs, however, will run off a central server.

That's another way of saying "dumb client".

-drasnor
22 May 2005 ~ 10:28am lemonlime We're sorry, you must upgrade to Windows XP Professional/Home to execute 'calc.exe'
22 May 2005 ~ 4:48pm FAH_WW Still, it could be a good idea. Even if it's a dumb client, it's gonna be an improvement to continue using the very, very limited resources a lot of schools have.
23 May 2005 ~ 2:37am TheSmJ I think it's a very noble idea as long as its a fair price and gives the schools and business what they need.

I know at my highschool, most of the computers were crummy in terms of what they had on the market already, but still had more features then the students would EVER need.
23 May 2005 ~ 9:55am mmonnin At my HS they couldnt afford to 1.) Get new PCs all the time, they got so many new ones every year but there were still a lot of old ones around and 2.) Upgrade every PC in the school system to 2k or XP. That and a lot were still P1 133 MHz machines. The next step up was some Celeron 533MHx machines. They cant run XP. But I guess this is were this new version comes in. Thing is, most schools still cant pay for an OS upgrade like that plus have some type of central server.

What my HS did was just get new machines from Dell which had 2k or XP already on it and placed those in the labs and libraries where they would get the most use. They then bumped the older ones into the classrooms so each classroom would have several computers, even if they were crappy 133MHz Pentium machines.

This is going to have to be pretty cheap for schools to setup this thing.