Yesterday Linden Lab blogged about updates to the Second Life system requirements. This mainly centred around Linden Lab no longer wanting to support Windows XP because Microsoft no longer support Windows XP. This is fine and lots of companies will follow suit.
However where matters get a tad distasteful is in Linden Lab’s moves to block future installs of the client on machines that aren’t running Windows XP Service Pack 3.
This is a very bizarre move considering the client will happily run on Windows XP SP2. There are numerous reasons why clients crash on systems, people running Windows XP are likely to be running older hardware and have less RAM than modern systems, for example, but upgrading to a new OS or Service Pack is not likely to improve their performance to any great degree in terms of Second Life.
I don’t see the problem with Linden Lab saying they are going to stop supporting Windows XP, it’s a sensible move but it’s not Linden Lab’s role to dictate to people whose systems can run Second Life, what Service Pack level they should be at unless it poses a threat to the Second Life service as a whole, which is clearly not the case or else Windows XP would have been blocked long ago.
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