Make Windows XP last longer

In May 2001, Microsoft started work on the next version of its Windows operating system. Working under the codename Longhorn, Vista was initially set for release in 2003 and was planned to be a stop-gap between XP and Microsoft’s next-generation operating system, codenamed Blackcomb.

But as Longhorn gradually assimilated many of Blackcomb’s intended features, the release date kept being pushed back. Then, in late 2004, Microsoft decided the codebase had become too unwieldy to manage, so it opted to start again and base it on the more reliable Windows Server 2003.

By the time Longhorn was re-dubbed Vista in mid-2005 and the first beta was released, Microsoft had spent four years working on it ­ it also still had another year and a half of development to go.

With all that time taken in development, and industry estimates of more than $10bn spent on it, everyone expected Vista to be even more popular than Windows XP.

Power hungry
Disappointment set in early for Vista, when many users discovered how woefully inadequate their PCs were at running the operating system. Microsoft said all you needed was an 800MHz processor, with 512MB of memory to run Vista (or a 1GHz processor with 1GB of memory to be Premium Ready).

In reality, it turned out that unless you turned off all the fancy stuff ­ such as the Aero interface ­ you really needed at least a 1.3GHz processor and a minimum of 2GB of Ram. What’s more, although Vista had been in beta testing for 18 months, there weren’t nearly enough hardware drivers ready on its release, and many printers and other add-ons failed to work with it.

Bearing this in mind, many users have opted to only purchase Vista when it’s installed on a new computer that has the power required to run it properly. This leaves millions of computers out there running XP very nicely, and whose owners are wary of upgrading it when there’s no apparent need to do so.