Over the years loyal windows XP users have held onto it, although there have been two newer versions released, the windows Vista and ‘7’. Main reason being the stability and lesser errors. Windows XP was by far the best go Microsoft had on the operating systems, user friendly, easily mod-able and compatibility with hardware and software of no match. Its success also has a lot to do with its crack-ability and availability of illegal copies of all sorts of software’s, from graphical suites to video editing utilities and from DAWs to possibly any game. Indeed Microsoft has always had problems with tackling piracy issue, not only third party software’s but its own native software’s have all been easily crack-able, thus its popularity with masses, from people who do actually buy operating systems and the ones, who just download illegal copies.

Talking of compatibility, unfortunately there is a hard drive evolution expected to take place around 2011, switching to ‘advanced format’ drives, that will have more storage, lesser power usage and greater reliability. To summarize the change coming about, the drives are switching from 512 bytes sector size to 4k sector sizes, sector sizes effect how the hard drives are formatted and data is stored. (Ever wondered why so much of your hard drive capacity magically disappears after formatting?) This is all to reduce the space wasted between sectors and thus lesser need for error codes. There are speculations of the newer format drives to be somewhere between 7 to 11% more efficient. Not too much, but still considerable improvement.
All the hard drive makers have now committed to adopting the new 4k format by the end of January 2011, which means users of older and obsolete operating systems, including XP will have to upgrade and make necessary amends. Most of the modern day OS’ like apple’s tiger, leopard and snow, Windows Vista and 7 and Linux Kernel were developed or released after the 4k formats was decided upon and XP was released before that.

Luckily, for the loyal XP fans, this shift would not totally throw XP into the obsolete category, since there all already ways being developed and some already in place to make it all work together, not to perfection though. Western Digital has already released a software utility that makes it possible for XP users to use the new 4k format drives. The whole idea is to make the newer drives pretend for XP that they are still using 512 sectors. This emulation will make it possible and a smooth running but there is still a problem, reading data off the drives will be smooth and totally reliable but when it comes to writing data onto the drives, there are expected to be glitches as according to Perkins, Field Technical Consultant from WD, not all Windows disk cloning tools are 4KB savvy, and misalignments - impacting write performance - could arise. There are also hardware hacks being tested like use of hardware jumpers to aid emulation.

So for serious users, specially the ones playing with film and audio this ‘writing’ issue comes as a huge problem and the simple remedy is to unfortunately upgrade to either to vista or windows 7 or switch to Apple altogether, because whether you like it or not, the 4k drives become a standard from 2011.

Web Resources:

http://hothardware.com/Articles/WDs-1TB-Caviar-Green-w-Advanced-Format-Windows-XP-Users-Pay-Attention/

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

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2010/03/10/wd_targets_windows_xp_4k/

http://gadgetsteria.com/2010/03/11/new-4k-hard-drive-format-to-cause-aging-woes-for-windows-xp/

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