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For the sake of your safety, you both should seriously refrain from advertising that you’re using XP. Unsecured sites like FR can very easily be sniffed, and your IPs can be discovered. As soon as that happens, it’s less than 10 minutes of work to compromise your XP machine. I’ve seen it, and I’ve done it myself (white hat) for my employer. There are 12 year old Russian kids who could do it with an IP address.

Seriously, if you’re using XP, please consider another OS. I don’t even care if you go to a Mac or Linux, just get the heck off of XP! You’re putting every last byte of personal data at risk of theft, and it’s technically impossible to browse the web securely anymore with XP due to cipher constraints at the OS kernel level.

On this issue, guys, seriously, Microsoft didn’t force the upgrade of your system for you. There are dozens of places you could disable it. If you had that little white Windows logo in your system tray for any appreciable amount of time, and you thought, “Oh, I’ll just ignore it, and I’ll be fine.” Nope.

There have been dozens of articles posted on FR and across the web on how to remove the installer and very specific instructions from Microsoft on how to disable the upgrade. Ignoring the warning signs is not reason enough to blame MS.

All of that said, and to soothe the people who are seething as they read what I just wrote, shame on Microsoft for even pushing Windows 10 as hard as they have. I get what they’re trying to do, but to force it on people leaves them with a bad taste in their mouth. Oh, and good luck upgrading your computer. Add any new hardware or switch to a new platform, and you’re going to have to pony up for another Windows 10 license.

Microsoft’s been making outstanding strides in the safety, security, and stability of their operating environments, but they’re pulling the rug out from themselves with shenanigans like this.