Posted on 04/23/2012 4:12:22 PM PDT by Nachum
Microsoft has kicked off what it calls a "two-year countdown" to the death of Windows XP and the Office 2003 productivity suite.
Separately, Microsoft announced that Windows Vista, the problem-plagued operating system that never really took hold among customers, exited mainstream support on April 10. In a product's extended support phase, Microsoft provides security patches to registered users but offers other fixes, including reliability and stability updates, only to organizations that have support contracts with the company.
Windows XP and Office 2003 will no longer be supported as of April 8, 2014, a company spokeswoman said in a recent blog post. On that date, Microsoft will stop shipping security updates for both products.
At that point, XP will have become Microsoft's longest-lived operating system. The company will have maintained the software for 12 years and five months -- or about two and a half years longer than it usually supports an OS. It supported the previous record-holder, Windows NT, for 11 years and five months.
Both XP and Office 2003 have been hugely successful. XP went on sale in October 2001, and Office 2003 launched in October 2003. "Windows XP and Office 2003 were great software releases, but the technology environment has shifted," said Stella Chernyak, a Microsoft marketing director.
(Excerpt) Read more at pcworld.com ...
Cool but going to be a little hard to find a floppy drive these days... /S > ; <
Darn it, I don’t want XP to go away. I’m already hating all the compatibility issues that will come up! ARRGHHH!
What if you have a counter rotating 2nd engine in your boat?
Makes me wonder if a group of current Microsoft employees couldn’t resign and form a new company that would continue support of XP.
“Eff” MS. There are ALOT of old machines that still use XP and will NOT be able to run Win7. Mostly, those machines are owned by families and small business - who don’t have an IT guy on staff to tweak the old machine.
Using Win7 Ultimate at home on the big machine, only because I am forced to because of school.
I’m going to take the XP bench machines that I have and partition them as a dual boot, so I can run Linux on them.
The more I learn about MS, the more I dislike them.
I’ve had two machines running Vista for several years now (Vista was OEM, so there were no upgrade issues). They’ve both performed flawlessly since the day I brought them home. What am I doing wrong?
Then shifting to LibreOffice will be a piece of cake.
I’ve gone to Google Docs.
What you were probably doing right was running Vista with Service Pack 1 or later installed. The original Vista was a bugfest, but Microsoft fixed it.
In that case, I hope that two years from now, a version of Linux is so user-friendly, I won’t care what Microsoft offers. I’ve heard good things about Linux Mint, but haven’t bothered to try it yet. Being a non-power user, XP does everything I need.
People love it, and I suppose it is the future of word processing, but I have resisted so far. Are my concerns about Google's contempt for my privacy unwarranted?
You are definitely one of the few.
The wife and I both use HP Mini netbooks as the basis for our system with peripheral everything. Her netbook has XP w/SP3, and mine came with Win7. The difference in performance is astounding. I wish I could go back to XP. Win7 is a memory hog.
Anyone who wants to both connect to the Internet and keep the bad guys off of his computer.
Or you could just call me wildbill, I’ll there everyday :) Actually, I am a sales rep. in the the corporate space and what you say about our consumer sales tech support is absolutely true.
The old adage “you get what you pay for” has never been more appropriate.
I used it for quite some time and it’s a great office solution for companies that are cutting costs/in the startup phase or home users who don’t need the full functionality of MS Office.
Of course, none of that takes into account the fact that you know full and well that Google is spying on you.
My local small network has six computers; 4 with XP Pro and 2 with Win7 (one with 32-bit and the other with 64-bit). Operationally, I can't see any difference in operation.
The one thing that irritates me about MS is when they come up with a new OS, they rearrange the file directory structure or rename certain of them or change the icon. That causes confusion when you're trying to find something and it's not located under the directory you're used to finding it in.
Now, will I upgrade from XP to Win7? I believe that if it is working OK and it isn't broken, you don't fix it. I think there is a niche market for XP geeks to band together to keep XP alive when and if MS stops supporting it. It makes sense simply because there are so many machines running XP. Even Win7 is partitioned so you can run some XP programs on it, because they won't run on Win7.
If Win8 is coming out in October, what does it offer over XP and Win7? In any event, if you go to Win8, wait until SP1 comes out so MS can have its customers troubleshoot their new OS for them. [That's the standard MS operating procedure.]
I guess I should have prefaced that with MS ...updates.
There are a host of security stuff out there just as good as MS stuff and free.
Ah - it’s on a CD. But I do have Lotus Ami Pro and some other early 90s Lotus Suite apps on something like 40 floppies.
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