Microsoft has stopped providing XP users with security updates, forcing them to either upgrade to another, newer operating system, or gamble with their safety. While the latest usage figures show that a large portion of users are moving away from XP, there’s still a sizable number of users who aren’t – or can’t.
If you’re an XP user, or know some XP users, there’s a trick which makes it possible to receive security updates for the aging OS for another five years – right up until April 2019.
I have a better solution. No registry hacks required!
And no large wads of $$$ required: http://distrowatch.com/
In particular, if you are on low specs: http://puppylinux.org/
And if you’re not: http://spins.fedoraproject.org/kde/#downloads
Add rpmfusion to your repo list and you can even do “yum install akmod-nvidia” and “yum install steam”.
If you consider that a “solution” that is equal to Windows you must consider it completely reasonable to forge your own silverware from scraps because that is the difference, one is an actual OS and the other is a bunch of small little tools made by people that don’t even talk to each other!
Windows get 10 years of updates WITHOUT dealing with the mess than is Linux “upgrades”, if you believe Linux upgrades actually work please take the Hairyfeet challenge and post it to YouTube, its stood nearly 7 years without a single “user friendly” distro passing. I can take a box from 2002, install XP RTM and update it aaaallll the way to XP EOL and there will be ZERO driver failures.
I would like to see someone attempt this with a “user friendly” distro…take Ubuntu from 2006 and upgrade it to current. BTW I’m not joking, please do because I have and its funny how badly it trashes itself! Wireless won’t work, sound? that is right out, and if your video chip is anything but CERTAIN Intel chips (not all, because some Intel chips are PowerVR, how does Joe User know which is which? Its a surprise, like stepping on a landmine, what fun!) you’ll be staring at a black screen o’ death.
Linux is for programmers and those that LIKE spending days tinkering with their OS, if that is you? Then I’m happy for you, just as I’m happy that some people like making their own knives and forks, but that makes you around 2% of the population at most, for everybody else? Telling them to replace XP with Linux is like telling them to replace their own car with this pile of parts in a box, most won’t have the skills, the time, nor the inclination to deal with that mess and will happily pay for something that works OOTB and keeps on working down the road!
Sorry, the “Hairy feet challenge”? Should we know what that is?
I keep hearing how difficult it is to upgrade Linux, which is news to me and the fifteen years I’ve been using it, with both Redhat & Debian based distributions. As far as I can see it works as well any upgrade of Windows, or OS X.
Still it’s a nice canard that people can use. Same as “Linux doesn’t have drivers for <obscure piece of hardware no but the poster cares about>! THIS IS AN OUTRAGE!”
Not really, no-one cares about it. It’s basically a test these whiny system builders came up with to justify their own “linux-isn’t-ready” mantra.
I wouldn’t go as far as labeling them as “builders,” since they don’t build anything really. Specially given how the gist of his argument was that “building” things is bad, apparently…
If you can’t use Google here ya go, its a VERY simple test (which the fact that no mainstream Linux has passed is absolutely shameful) and accurately simulates the (no longer) typical 5 year support cycle of a PC. if it were a REAL test it would be 8 years, since modern multicores can easily be run 7-8 years but that would exclude many modern “user friendly” Linux distros and when in doubt I wanted to give Linux the benefit of the doubt. Challenge as follows..
Take ANY PC that you want, be it desktop or laptop, the only condition on the hardware being it must have wireless and be hooked with WPA V2, this condition has been added because i haven’t built or set up a single system in the last 5 years that didn’t have wireless, WiFi has become as common as Ethernet. Here are the conditions, again the fact that such a simple test fails is truly sad..
1.- take the system and install the mainstream distro from the quarter Vista was released (or if you wish to compare to Win 7 its release date) (NOT LTS because Canonical states on their website that LTS is not for home users but for business customers, if you don’t like this take it up with Canonical but you can’t expect normal users to ignore warnings like that) which if you were using say ubuntu would be V 6.04 for Vista or 9.04 for Win 7, insure that ALL of the drivers work, for this feel free to use CLI, Google for fixes, whatever you need to do, 2.- make sure the wireless can surf with WPA V2 (because not having a secure WiFi today is insanity) 3.- Upgrade/date to current using only the GUI as any normal user would be expected to do.
THAT IS IT, that is ALL there is to it! There is NO support for printers included, NO support for increasingly popular add ons like miFi or USB capture sticks, NO support for any popular software required, i have made the test so tilted in favor of the “strengths” of Linux its a joke. What to know what happens when you try to get ANY mainstream “user friendly” distro to do what frankly ANY OS should consider its absolute minimum function, to update its own base as security threats are found? I can tell you because I did it with several distros, including ubuntu, PCLOS, and mepis…IT TRASHES ITS OWN DRIVERS and does so horribly! NO working wireless, hell not even working sound, and unless you get REALLY lucky when it comes to video hardware you won’t get beyond VESA when it comes to video either!
Believe me I wish it weren’t so, nearly a third of my build price is Windows licensing, but I can’t hand my customers an OS that can’t even be updated reliably.
You are “hairyfeet,” aren’t you? LOL
It says so on my user account, this website won’t let you change the UID and I was here before I was at Slashdot.
And you can tapdance and try to move the goalposts that won’t change the fact that you are trying to defend an OS that can’t even perform the most basic of functions that ANY OS should be capable of, to update itself without crapping on its own drivers!
I mean for fuck’s sake its 2014, and we have literally millions of Linux fanboys DEFENDING an OS that can’t even perform what OSX and Windows was doing a fucking decade ago! Really? Are you REALLY gonna defend an OS that can’t even fucking update? I had to LMAO when a fanboy on another site said its not a fair test and you would reinstall IRL, really? A DOZEN reinstalls, the shit that Linux fanboys USED to make fun of Windows over, just to get LESS support than you get with Windows? Is this really what you’ve come to?
What I find fucking insane is how many Linux fans scream about “freedum!” and how badly “teh ebil M$” and awful Apple treats you and you are getting worse in every way from Linux and not only won’t say a damned word you’ll THANK the devs for such lousy service? WTF people?
The fact that your OS won’t even perform the most basic of functions should make you furious! You should be screaming bloody murder! Is this REALLY a community that has what the LSB blog calls the “shit sandwich concept” where you’ll take a shit sandwich because its free? I’m sorry but if your OS can’t even perform a basic task like updating without crapping all over itself its not me you have to worry about, its why the community would be willing to accept something that doesn’t even come close to what Windows did a dozen fricking years ago! You’d laugh Redmond off the map if THEY tried to pull such piss poor functionality upon you, why are you willing to sit here and take that shit from Linus?
My “OS?” What are you talking about?
I simply think that using your own post in another forum, as if it was somehow a validated reference to justify your point, is both silly and an example of bad circular thinking.
That “challenge” it’s idiotic anyways. That kind of bad “science” could be applied to Windows (or any other OS/Product for that matter) as well; let me find something that a specific version of windows fails at, then let’s go ahead and forbid those window versions that do not fail the “challenge” to be included for consideration, and voila: Anyone can claim with a straight face, in the future, how Windows is a failure in general terms because it somehow fails a random silly “test”….
Edited 2014-06-03 18:44 UTC
Just a note that CentOS 5 and 6 provide 10 years of updates without having to do a major OS upgrade – CentOS 6 is supported until November 2020 for example.
I’ve used it on various desktop kit without a problem and it’s a very solid and functional desktop (OK, it isn’t bleeding edge like Fedora or Ubuntu are, but if you’re doing serious stuff, you don’t want that). In fact, CentOS 6 is so good, I don’t even think CentOS 7 will be an improvement (several major changes that actually make things harder to administer), but I can stay on CentOS 6 for at least another 6 years if I want, unlike any other Linux distro.
Sorry, but all I do is install Kubuntu LTS, spend around half an hour tweaking KDE to my liking, then use it for the next five years until the next LTS is released.
What is it exactly that I’m supposed to be tinkering with?
Except Linux is not a drop-in replacement for XP and it most likely won’t run the applications that keeps these folk on XP.
How is installing Linux a better solution for Windows users than Windows 7? Somebody hanging on to XP doesn’t exactly embrace change 😉
xp was the best os that i’ve ever had. i have no idea why people are saying 7 is better. (we can agree to skip vista)
all 7 does better is multi-core support. that’s the only feature i miss in xp. if multicore support was backported from 7 to xp, i would use xp. with the works of nLite you could make the most popular OS _your_ OS. You can customize xp to your heart’s desire. And that’s what i loved about it most. With introduction of Vista, WinSXS came, and to this day i still don’t understand the real purpose of it. The argument of “today the hdd space costs x/$” does not matter really. If you make an EXE of 10Gb, it wil run slower than an EXE of 1Mb. So, nLite’d xp took 300mb on disk, which was more than of OS for me to use. And now i’m forced to use 10Gb+ of an OS, which runs slower due to disk usage (SSDs still relatively expensive)
tl;dr; Give me the possibility of minimal system to run .exe, i’m happy. I don’t need any ‘home user’ feature.
Yeah, but you know, OSes are more secure now, more user friendly, see how 8.1 improved 8.0 by adding a Start button (introduced in Windows 95), see how surfing the web is better with the new Windows, it will be even better in Windows 9, then 10, then…
Try installing a stripped down Windows 2000 SP4, no multicore support at all, no 64 bits, but so fast and lightweight. It have Internet (Firefox, Opera), OpenGL, Office, games and hardware support.
Sometimes I wonder if planned obsolescence was just a fantasy, how long would they have made Windows 2000 last by improving its core without the need to update to XP, Vista, 7, … and now every 2 years.
If Linux was not such a mess and stable, perhaps I would reconsider using it on a daily basis, but update are now in GB and often breaks everything for the sake of… of evolution ? Oooh, just like Windows.
Kochise
Eh? Maybe I’m no longer good at judging (after all–I stopped using bloated desktop environments a while back.) Still, I did not uninstall any part of the KDE 4 desktop that came standard with openSUSE 13.1, and the largest update I’ve seen was maybe 200-250 MB. And that is after quite a large amount of time (a month or two) not even checking. My Debian server is downright boring, because it’s so stable all I ever get is “no updates available” or the max that I’ve seen it give is two or three updates.
Install a basic window manager or desktop environment (hint: it doesn’t have to be KDE 4 or GNOME 3) and you won’t be downloading gigabytes of updates. Hell, from my experience, even with one of the most bloated Linux desktops I never got anywhere near your claimed gigs of updates, so I’m gonna just call bullshit on your claim and end it there.
Sorry, but I couldn’t agree more. Happens again and again and again… things work, then they don’t… for no good reason.
It sounds like you’ve only ever used Ubuntu or Fedora. That is indeed an issue with those distros. I’ve settled on using Crunchbang Linux, and I don’t have the issues you stated. corenominal is very conservative with changes to the OS, and the only thing I’ve found to be more stable across all OSes (including Windows and Mac OS) is Slackware Linux.
That said, Windows can be very stable as long as you don’t have bad hardware. Just be careful about what you install, because one rogue piece of malware can take down the whole system.
Windows 8.1 is Windows 2000 with an improved core. They are all NT. Windows 2000 was NT 5.0 Windows 8.1 is NT 6.3 (why? who knows?)
Leave everything the same and let my competitors pass me by is not a sound business model. Never has been, never will.
You are pants on head retarded. NT5 is awful. I’d rather use NetBSD than an NT5 based version of Windows at this point.
http://i.imgur.com/DILyvaF.jpg
You still smokin’ that whacky tobaccy Kochise?! Which distro is “such a mess”, takes GB’s to update and “breaks everything” in the process? You must have dug deep to find something like that!.. Make the move to Linux Mint or another top tier distro and discover what you’ve been missing, desktop systems that are exceptionally well designed, make computing a pleasure and “just work” right out of the box. You’ll be glad you did!..
May I ask what you consider a top-tier distro? Are you talking about commercial ventures or freebies?
I went back to using OpenSuSE because at the time it was the ONLY distro that would allow me to create a bootable raid drive at install time (others promised but didn’t deliver). I had faith in them.
I had other raid drives configured, too. Then one day after an update my drives no longer appeared at boot. No warning. After digging about it turned out the drive was OK, but the implementation had changed and it was no longer mounted automatically. Why? I Dunno.
I want to be able to use my machine without constantly having to research why something doesn’t work any more. I hate MS but it’s rare they bork an update completely.
Edited 2014-06-02 09:52 UTC
XP was noisy as hell. Upon first install, you were given a worthless Flash “tour” of the operating system (which you would have to skip manually with ESC) before the OS would even boot, and then when you’re finally in there it would be saying there’s a tour in the system tray, which you had no choice to click just to close to get it to shut up. The OS whined that there was no firewall (pre-SP2), that there was no anti-virus software installed, that it needed activation. The list goes on… it just wouldn’t shut the fuck up.
On top of all that, I recall going through ridiculous amounts of time, literally running all over the OS, in every damn corner and aspect of its functionality, just to get the operating system’s settings decently tolerable. This included various control panel sections, options of key programs (Explorer), changing the theme, unhiding countless things that should not be hidden in the first place, and even worse, a bunch of crap could only be fixed by digging deep into the bowels of the registry.
Needless to say none of this was fun. A time consuming pain in the ass is what Windows XP was, to get the OS to perform and function in a tolerable way.
Windows 7 has quieted this obnoxiously annoying noise down immensely, with activation being the major one that remains. It will automatically download Microsoft Security Essentials (if you let it) and leave you the hell alone about anti-virus software. A software firewall is standard. No more retarded tour.
In conclusion, XP *sucked* compared to 7. Hell, I would say it sucked even compared to Windows 98SE before it in many ways. Looking back, I thought WinME brought in nothing but junk and bloat (and instability). WinXP unfortunately brought all that junk and bloat with it, but at least (being built on the NT kernel) it did not bring the instability. That was pretty much my only reason for upgrading to it: WinME just sucked so bad, and XP was comparably much better.
Yeah win 7 > win xp. Obviously, from a features and security standpoint. But you’re getting a little crazy when you start talking about win 98 se being better. Oh my word that was bad. It was insecure, unstable, and lived in a world of dll hell that made the applications kill each other. Once you went to windows xp, you simply could not go back to windows 98 se ( unless you needed to due to missing drivers)
You just described literally every single OS in the Win9x series and in fact the entire DOS family before it, and I would even argue (to a lesser extent), even the NT series. Certainly XP’s original release was no saint when it comes to security, and its first couple service packs didn’t exactly perfect it either. But have *you* ever tried ME? I would use 98SE any day over it. Yeah, I agree with XP over both of them though, if only for the increased stability… but Win98 was still a much less annoying OS.
I was unlucky in that I bought a new computer during the time that piece of shit, Windows ME, was being pawned off and forced onto people. It fucking *sucked*. I will take Windows 98SE, which I used previously, any day. And XP, the ONLY thing it had over both ME and 98, is stability. That’s it. It was effectively a carbon copy of ME, but built on the NT kernel. It brought all the junk ME brought. But at least it didn’t crash every two minutes and require a format/reinstall every eight due to file system corruption.
I used Me for quite some time, and it was fine… (no worse than 98SE at least)
I suspect people too often tried to apply to Me old “tricks” from 98SE, which however often broke the system (due to some differences, partial removal of DOS mode)
There are also many changes to the virtual memory subsystem – including support for paging VRAM out to system ram so DX10 developers don’t have to worry about manually swapping textures in and out of VRAM – D3D10 does that automatically, and is part of the Windows VM subsystem.
NUMA support is also much improved for multi-socket systems.
Windows 7 is actually capable of being shrunk down significantly smaller than XP – a 25MB system image is possible if all you want to do is run a web server. You can use 7Customizer to do so (Well, maybe not that far with that tool, but it is possible).
The recovery tools are far more robust with Vista and later, both the GUI driven tools, and the recovery console.
UI improvements abound – searchable Star Menu, dock-styled task bar (If you want it, that is), improved window management (Aero Snap, etc).
Security is better – not just the DEP found in XP, but ASLR, UAC, and several years of weeding out security vulnerabilities. Vista and later have greatly benefited from the security-focused changes to the Windows development process. Since Vista and later have lots more additions than XP, these things show up in 7.
UEFI support means Windows can use disk controllers to boot that might not be as easily supported on non-UEFI systems. I’ve had to roll my own XP install plenty of times to get it to be able to boot of various SCSI and SATA controllers.
WinSxS is actually smaller than what Windows Explorer reports, and if you’re checking the size of C:\Windows, the whole thing takes up significantly less disk space. Much of WinSxS is hardlinks, which Explorer doesn’t account for accurately.
The purpose of WinSxS is two-fold: First, keep a store of old system files for the purpose of compatibility and being able to uninstall updates, and to keep copies of all Windows components on disk so you never need to supply a Windows DVD to install extra stuff.
Since these components are only loaded on demand, your “1GB exe loads faster than a 10GB exe” complaint doesn’t actually have much meaning – there isn’t a huge amount of extra code that gets loaded, and due to the MinWin refactoring, there is at times a reduced footprint.
Did you try “ReactOS” or Wine?
They run .exe files.
And if your binary is .NET, Mono is an alternative too.
Yes some people who are sticking with XP, are doing so because they dislike change, have lower powered hardware, or don’t want to (or can’t) pay to upgrade. However those aren’t the sole reasons.
The people I know who are sticking with XP are doing so because they have hardware that simply will not work against Windows Vista, 7, or 8. In one case it is the control software for industrial hardware; but in all the others we are talking medical devices.
In the latter case, those users don’t have an option to upgrade or replace. They aren’t luddites, they aren’t cheap, they are just stuck.
Yup, my backup server is on XP.
Win 7 won’t support my tape drive, so XP stays.
I just have to remember not to browse the web from that machine. Simples.
There aren’t the same drivers, it’s a resource hog, It’s stuffed with more eye-candy, but is hard to control. 7 is Vista lite.
All true, but when run on modern hardware at least the extra power kind of minimizes the perceived performance deficiencies of the OS. After all, I’d say Windows XP could have been described as a bloated POS in comparison to some of the older releases in the Win9x family including Windows 98 as I mentioned previously in this thread, due to it bringing in a lot of junk from Windows ME.
And I don’t think the drivers thing is anywhere near the problem it once was with Vista–it has long since been stabilized, for the most part. I say “for the most part” because I still get occasional crashes on boot since upgrading my laptop from Windows 8 to 8.1, and this has not been fixed in the latest 8.1 update–and I’m almost sure it’s a driver problem.
Edited 2014-06-01 01:05 UTC
This registry hack story is almost a week old and the XP updates you get are for Embedded XP and *not* Desktop XP. Hence, there’s a chance some desktop XP patches (the ones you now pay for) won’t actually appear in the Embedded XP updates. So, it’s not really a good solution anyway.
To be honest, if you’re still running XP, the chances are your hardware is pretty old/slow and probably will run like a dog if you try to upgrade beyond XP. As ever, the best way to upgrade from any Windows OS is to buy a new machine. You get it pre-installed and the cost is absorbed by the OEM, never mind that the hardware will actually be good enough to run it too!
It’s why Vista got a bad rep – people trying to upgrade from it on dog slow kit found it needed more resources and bitched about it (I ran it on a new PC and it was fine – only fault I could see was the over-zealous UAC prompting).
As other people have said, perhaps a Windows-friendly Linux distro might be another route to take for XP users, especially if you’re just a casual user that Web browses, e-mails and does the odd bit of word processing.
The problem is that there often just isn’t an alternative for Windows users. When you visit the Microsoft site that the ‘no updates’-warning in Windows XP now takes you to. The first phrase is “Most computers are not suitable for Windows 8” and you’re suggested to buy a new computer.
I also have multiple notebooks which are too old for Windows because of this. They work fine with Debian, but it would be impossible to continue to use them with Windows according to Microsoft itself.
I also have a SunPCI II board. You cannot run anything newer than Windows XP or any other OS on it, because there are only storage drivers for Windows.
I’m not surprised that Microsoft dropped support for Windows XP, but that they are not offering any upgrade path without buying new hardware as well surprised me a lot.
Exactly. I had to install Xubuntu on my sisters PC when a crash borked her XP install. I couldn’t repair or reinstall despite having a legal XP disk and a legal COA. The other options – a retail copy of Windows 7 or a new PC – were too expensive for a PC that is only for web browsing.
You cannot directly upgrade XP to Windows 7. You must upgrade XP to Vista and then upgrade Vista to Windows 7. The other option is a clean install of Windows 7. Neither path is really feasible for a non-techie.
Microsoft wants you to buy a new PC to keep the hardware vendors happy rather than provide an obvious upgrade path to Windows 7.
Well, if you’re doing proper backups, a clean install to go from XP to 7 is not really much of an issue. The hardest part is making sure your hardware works with 7. Common offenders are printers, wireless cards, and video cards. Everything else should “just work”.
At work, I’ve completed our upgrade to Windows 7 across the board (with the exception of a lone server that requires XP to run the software on it; I have it firewalled so that it can’t access the Internet). Some of the upgrades were done by buying new hardware, but many of our workstations were powerful enough to run 7, sometimes with only a RAM upgrade, most times as-is. One of the first things I did when I started working there years ago as the only IT staff, was to set up a proper backup system. All employee accounts are backed up to a NAS, which is mirrored to another NAS in a different part of the building. Critical files are also backed up to an offsite server.
So, when I wiped XP from a workstation and installed 7, within 20 minutes of booting into the new OS the user had all of her files back in place and backing up to the NAS again.
Granted, this is a business environment, but at home it’s even simpler: Back up your stuff to an external hard drive on a regular basis, and take advantage of services like Dropbox, and when you do a clean install of Windows 7 or 8.1 your files will be waiting on you.
I honestly don’t know why this is such an alien concept these days.
You forget bout installing all the applications again if you’re doing a clean install… Sometimes finding the original discs that haven’t been used in 10 years is a bit of a problem in itself, then you find out that some or other obscure bit of software doesn’t work with 7, and when you check, the developers aren’t in business any more so that’s out the window…
Just personal experience though. Windows 7 is quite nice, I use it in work, but my main machine at home is still XP, and will be until I’m given a reason worthy of shelling out a chunk of cash for.
Once again, not an issue if you’re prepared. And we’ve had five years to prepare for the move from XP to Windows 7. There’s really no excuse at this point, beyond obscure vertical market apps whose publishers won’t make the move.
Exactly, “if you’re prepared”… Most average Joes aren’t, and think that reinstalling their machine from scratch is as easy as copying everything off and on again. It’s only after that’s done and they can’t open some file they’ve been working on for years in some obscure genealogy application that it’s a problem. And then they can’t find the disc they had it on. And then there’s always those who are genuinely put out that their computer can no longer “read” Word documents and Powerpoint slides, when it was before you went near it.
It’s something I do, don’t get me wrong, but if I’m not 100% sure they have everything in a line, I just refuse.
Well, when I do an upgrade for someone, I don’t half-ass it. No offense, but maybe that’s why you seem to have trouble with it? I sit down with the client and go over everything they do with their computer, what the state of their backups are (usually nonexistent, unfortunately) and what applications they will need to get back to where they were. If they need to buy an app, say, Microsoft Office, and they don’t want to pay that much for it, I’ll offer to train them on OpenOffice or LibreOffice. Most home users aren’t using the full scope of Office, and can suffice with a standard free office suite with sensible default settings.
These days, there’s a free/Open Source app for pretty much any home use case. Even when there isn’t, I offer to train my clients on a cheaper alternative as long as it’s cost-effective for them. In short, I don’t just wipe and reinstall and say “have a nice day, good luck with that”.
Well you can always propose a migration to some other genealogy soft (sooner or later they will probably have to do it anyway) …quick search gives many possible candidates:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Free_genealogy_software
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genealogy_software (table at the bottom, info about GEDCOM data sharing format)
https://www.gramps-project.org/wiki/index.php?title=Other_genealogy_…
http://www.eolfhs.org.uk/hdocs/EoLFHS_Free_Genealogy_Software.pdf
The real question is what the value of the data your computer holds, and what it would cost you if it were infected with a virus. The cost of a new computer isn’t as high as it was when windows xp was released.
You can get a decent generic system for $500.
You may also need to buy newer versions of third party software that are compatible with 7/8.
So if your data isn’t valuable, and/or you do have expensive custom software. Then I guess that makes sense. My gut feeling is that most people don’t value their data more than anything else.
In any case, I don’t understand the whining. Microsoft hasn’t kept these dates a secret. If financial reasons keep you from upgrading, well Microsoft has never been very charitable.
Fair point, but I’m pretty happy with my data security, backup regime, firewalling and so on. There’s nothing critical on my XP machine that I don’t have in multiple other locations, and you’d be hard pushed to get near the machine from outside. Most of my coding and tinkering is done on other machines and OSes, but again, that’s stored in multiple locations too so not a big issue.
The issue isn’t really money – my PC doesn’t need replacing and is very capable of running Windows 7 – but what I would get for that money. In my case, that’s basically some eye candy and a pain in the ass setting everything up again. There’s not a single feature of Windows 7 that actually piques my interest. It’s not that the EOL date caught me by surprise – it’s been coming a long time. And I’m not actually moaning about it, I’m perfectly happy to keep using XP for now, just I don’t see why people are getting in such a fuss because of that.
If and when I have some sort of catastrophic drive failure or something, I’ve no doubt I’ll reinstall from 7 since I’ll have to reinstall from scratch anyway, but for now that machine is working absolutely perfectly and just the way I want it, so why on Earth would I go fundamentally changing it?
I think its easier and wiser to just tell everyone they should upgrade, rather than telling them to do a full security audit on their xp machines and determine the cost of a malware infection.
You sound competent to make your own decisions, but I, by my nature, am very paranoid. I would not even trust myself to do that calculation correctly.
IMHO you need a trip to the real world. Most XP users seem to have a screen covered with icons, dozens of ‘essential’ applications and games that are no longer available and thousands of photos, files and documents files saved in seemingly random locations. They don’t have an external hard drive and are totally incapable of setting up a drop box account.
If you live in Australia you will probably have a super slow (2Mbps) DSL connection with download quotas that make cloud storage a total PITA.
So you’ve seen every single Windows XP desktop in the world and that qualifies you to make that gross generalization, am I right?
I do agree with you that some home users are clueless. But those clueless users tend to be the ones who go out and buy new hardware instead of fussing with OS upgrades. For the ones who do go the difficult route, they tend to go to their local computer store or a knowledgeable relative for help with the transition. I’ve seen all of that, along with the more computer savvy users, as I’ve been doing consulting on the side for nearly 20 years now.
You could have put the link to Microsoft’s page.
Instead, Amazon.com now has the idea that I really want Windows 7, so the ad is popping up everywhere on my non-cleaned devices (e.g. my kindle, when it is not using privoxy to scrape the trash).
I won’t bury a NSFW product link from the worst things for sale here, but really…
Like I need to send M$ more money!!! NOT!
Doubtless, under the hood XP has it’s limitations but does anyone who still uses it really lack anything worthwhile. I just tried it, after not using it for many years, as a VM in Win 8.1 and apart from a kinda dated look and a few bits & bobs usability ‘improvements’ I didn’t feel any urge top discontinue using and certainly didn’t feel the need to pay Microsoft any monies to go large with Vista/7/8 which, of course, I’ve already done these last few years….what have we really gained from these OS improvements, I know not.