http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8557144.stm


I have to say this was news to me

Most of the recent reviews of hard drives I've read in German magazines have had a box-out about this and actually list XP compatibility against each drive reviewed...

The 512b emulation is included in a lot of drives, but they don't universally work with XP at the moment.

Will this be an issue for many? As people replace their machines they will get new OSes which can cope. Though I suppose businesses which still use XP a lot may be affected.

That bit's interesting... Personally, I've no intention of leaving XP any time soon since there's no benefit in 7 for me from what I can tell, and I've got enough drives around the place to just back up my installation to another one anyway. Also, I take it we're talking about HDDs here rather than SSDs?

That's another thing, I'll probably want a SSD when they're cheap enough

You need to visit Bit-Tech more often.

Yeah True.

Is XP still on Microsoft’s support rota? If so, then they surely have to address this.

I should hope so, Netbooks are still sold with XP. The issue would be how would old XP CD's install if they can't read the drives. Any XP changes would need the updates after a clean install.

I imagine you could use the "Install third party RAID drivers" option, provided you have a floppy drive and someone has actually written one.

However, it doesn't really matter. They've been designed to work in an XP compatible mode, and although it may be 10% slower it will still be much faster than an old drive.

I'll be using XP on my Netbook, media centre and two main PCs for a long time to come. I quite like 7 but I can not justify the expense of upgrading until compatibility with new software and hardware forces the issue. I rarely buy a whole new machine, they just slowly evolve through upgrades.

It is in emergency support until some time in 2014. That means security patches, but no new functionality.

As this is new functionality and not security, the problem has already been "patched" with Vista and Windows 7...

This is the important bit.

I don't particularly like MS but they have done the decent thing and supported XP for over 8 years. You can't buy an OS in 2001 and expect it to remain current until 2011.

Sorry but XP users need to get with it.

I'll probably go Linux in 2014.

Hopefully there should be enough support by then, because I'm afraid I rather struggle with it at the moment. My biggest problem is simply graphics performance; my Acer could barely manage 1 frame a minute with the supplied Linux install compared to 50fps under XP. My HP had a similar performance gap, especially with Flash.

Until then, I doubt I'll be buying any new hardware or software except maybe a NAS so it just doesn't doesn't matter to me.