[Year 12 IT Apps] Re: Windows XP versus Vista

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

Lyndon writes,

> Subject: Re: [Oz-teachers] Windows XP versus Vista
> Date: Sun, 20 Jan 2008 14:52:45 +0900
> From: Lyndon Sharp <lyndons at ozemail.com.au>

You may find this interesting ..

Vista has not yet taken off (in the educational community at least).

I have just completed my annual analytics of the Board of Studies NSW
website for the whole of 2007. 

As the Board website has a lot of traffic, the folllowing figures might be
representative of the 'educational community' (teachers, parents, 
students, school system networks, libraries, etc.)

Of the 1,697,882 people who visited the Board website 4,116,984 times -
and looked at 16,779,333 pages during 2007, 94.50% of them used Windows
and 5.12% of them MacOS.

Of the Windows users, 90.86% used XP and 4.84% used Vista (2.44% used
Windows 2000.)

That is, there are currently still less Vista users than Mac users.

Not on the same topic, but may be of related interest - whilst Firefox is
rising rapidly - it is still the case that 66.71% of our visitors are
using Internet Explorer 6 and still only 32.91% have moved up to IE 7.

Falling rapidly (thank goodness) are the numbers of people who are still
using 800x600 resolution screens (6.37%), with 52.22% using 1024x768 and
everyone else is using much bigger screens (1280x800, 1152x864, 1440x900,
1680x1050, etc) ..

If you are interested in any of these statistics of website use, by the
way, let me know and I'll post a few more. Cheers.

Lyndon Sharp 
---------------- 
0419 211 120 
lyndon.sharp at bos.nsw.edu.au 
lyndons at ozemail.com.au 
--

On Sat Jan 19 7:09, stephen at melbpc.org.au sent: ..

Quite ridiculuosly, Vista demands 40 gig of space and a gig ram to run
thus making obsolete 90% of the world's computing hardware, especially
for schools and communities in developing countries. On the other hand
MS XP-SP3 is fast, reliable and really only needs to see pentiums. But
yet Microsoft is killing XP. If Gates really wants to be philanthropic
he should, as the InfoWorld petition requests, simply continue to have
XP supported and also come out with as many Vista upgrades as he wants.

For all of us with broadband-dual-core-2-gig-ram grunters who say Vista
is great, I'm very sincerely happy for you. But the digital divide will
soon get a whole lot wider when XP dies, and, otherwise useful machines
will end up as landfill all over the world. It seems really wrong to me.

So dear colleagues, I guess my whole point is, please do enjoy whatever
OS you have, if it's reliable, and fast enough, but spare a thought for
our third world, and sign the InfoWorld petition, for NO XP DEATH DATE!!

                           http://www.SaveXP.com

And in all the schools and post offices of so very many towns and
traditional villages in the Philippines (Pop:80M) where slow pentiums,
dot-matrix printers & modems reign, as in all third world countries, it's
Windows XP that's giving people a future. But viruses are rife, and it's a
fragile system socially and technically. Now would be a brilliant time the
charitable distro of a will-run-on-anything-with-drivers-for-everything
open source Operating System. 


Thanks Lyndon
Stephen Loosley
Victoria Australia