Bad news for the XP diehards out there, hard drive manufacturers are tired of supporting you, and the next generation of controller technology is not going to work properly with DOS and Windows XP users. Of course it won’t be a major issue until 2011, and maybe not even then.
It’s been coming for a while now, hard drives are constantly evolving and becoming more efficient, and drive manufacturers want to be freed from the 512 byte sector size. This of course isn’t an issue for more modern operating systems like Vista or Windows 7, but XP won’t be able to handle the larger sector sizes. This of course won’t be an immediate issue, but as XP machines age and require new hard drives, we’re going to see shortages of compatible hardware. Don’t expect this to be a major issue until 2011 though, because the drive manufacturers aren’t planning on adopting the new standards until then. After that, it just depends on how long it is until your XP hard drive dies.
[via BBC News]
This is interesting. I’m sure you and your friends have joked about how this or that device borked itself within a week of the warranty expiring, or right after a newer version was introduced. Planned obsolescence and all that. But I doubt you gave serious credence to the idea that there was actually a timer inside your laptop, ticking down to its destruction. Of course not, right? Well, if this article is to be believed, that’s actually a semi-serious concern in Japan, and Sony is trying hard to combat the resultant negative PR.
It seems that in 2006, several million Sony-branded batteries in Dell laptops all failed at the same time, and rumors began circulating that it was, in fact, a Sony “kill switch” that had malfunctioned and prematurely executed the laptops. Sounds silly to us, but apparently it’s really affecting sales over there, mainly of Vaio laptops and some other stuff.
I guess we have our own consumer myths, not just Pop Rocks and Coke but ideas like the Apple Tax, or that Compaq PCs are garbage, that kind of thing. But this Sony kill switch conspiracy theory was just too fun not to share.
obsolescence
