“Ancient”, as in around 15 years old. LOL
I will be out of the house all day. This will probably be my last ping for today.
Microsoft urges you to upgrade. I wonder why? me thinks its not for your benefit only
FWIW, Microsoft is still going to provide support for XP in China.
I’ve been using Linux for the past 5 years . I do have a dual boot for those few times when I HAVE to use Windows but I’m never going back. I LIKE tinkering under the hood!
“Better idea #1: Upgrade to Windows 7”
Agreed. If you like XP, you will like 7 just as well.
My old XP computer has been running Windows 7 with no problems for the past several years. This is a 2003 desktop that I built and has had several hardware changes (more ram, new video card, new dvd rom) but is using the original motherboard and cpu. windows 7 runs flawlessly on it.
Get a laptop or desktop with four i7 CPU cores.
From the boot time set up (BIOS, EFI, etc) ...
Turn on hyperthreads.
Turn on turbo boost.
Turn on Virtualization support.
I would disable secure boot for the Linux system, as it’s not really needed. Not yet.
Install Linux - RHEL, Fedora, Ubuntu, Mint, whatever. You can configure the new Gnome3 desktop to work like and even look like the Apple desktop. I’ve never done it, but one guy I know has.
Install W7 or W8 in a virtual machine running on your Linux system. I use VirtualBox, because it provides a “seamless desktop”. You have the Linux and Windows taskbars and apps sharing the same desktop.
Thoroughly firewall the Windows machine and run it without virus software. It’s only a virtual machine, so you can reinstall if by some chance it gets infected. Keep your data in a separate partition. There are tools to clean up your data if your Windows OS partition gets infected.
Best of both worlds.
If you want a trifecta, get an Apple. Big money, yes, but you can have virtual Windows AND Linux systems on the Apple, if you need to do development on those systems.
I am not an Apple fanboi, so please don’t flame me. I despise the fact that they do not allow you to buy their OS and run it as a VM on any other platform.
Kinda funny, considering that a major part of Windows 7 operates on the XP base!
However, lately, I have seen that there have been no major updates, only optional ones, for Windows 7, too.
1) Stay off porn sites.
2) Keep your virus software current.
3) See #1.
And you’re fine to run XP until your machine physically dies. If you insist on visiting porn sites, do what the porn pros do and go to Linux.
but Windows 8 sucks.
Does XP contain provisions to be an Internet Server?
There is some ridiculous advice on this thread. Do your own research, folks. Far away from FR, preferably.
I LOVED XP but migrated to windows 7 several years ago and have found it to be the most stable windows OS ever. Have windows 8.1 on a newer laptop and don’t like it nearly as well as 7.
XP had the infamous “Blue Screen of Death” - yes?
I used Win7 for many moons - far more stable than XP.
My new ASUS Ultrabook came with Win8 which I immediately upgraded to Win8.1. Easily the best and fastest of any MS OS I’ve used.
That'd be like Noah being warned to continue caring for the animals aboard or else the flood waters will go even higher -- perhaps even reach the Moon.
There is security intelligence that indicates that there will be malicious attacks on XP. These are zero day threats and anti-virus and malware companies are unable to block the attacks, until after the attack has occurred and a counter-measure has been created.
Microsoft will not provide any security updates unless a business pays for Custom Support. You must have Premier or Enterprise agreement in place with Microsoft. Custom Support cost $50 per machine per quarter and you need to purchase Custom Support for a minimum of 750 machines. At least that's the deal I got from MS. I think I saw an email from MS that they changed the terms earlier this past week, but it did not change our agreement since it was already in place.
Even with MS Custom support, XP boxes are not protected until after a threat has been discovered. Additional security measures should be in place and there should be no PII or IP information on those boxes.
For what is worth, part of my job for over the last 15 months has been migrating 80,000+ XP machines to Win 7. When I left the office yesterday, we had ~260 machines going on Custom Support and another 200 or so machines segmented from the network.
BTW, I am personally OS agnostic. At home, I have Mac OS, Win 7, Linux, iOS and Android OS. This post was written on an iPad, running iOS 7.1
Unless you have Windows-only apps that have no open source comparables, moving to Linux or Android is an option, and a cheap one. If a new machine is in the budget, there's also Mac.
Windows 7 is still available for purchase, but it appears that this includes only full-install products. The Upgrade products aren't listed at Newegg, for example.
I have legacy Windows apps, and elected to build a new PC based on an AMD APU, running Windows 7 Pro 64-bit, with XP Mode for the legacies. Once installed, networking will be turned off inside XP Mode to protect it.
XP Mode (which isn't supported on Win8, by the way) probably won't be available for download after EOL day. You have to have Win 7 (Ultimate, Pro or Enterprise only) installed and activated to get XP Mode. Installing XP Mode is challenging, esp. on AMD, which requires a hot fix. Installing XPM on Intel might be impossible, as their low-end stuff often has the necessary VM logic fused off.
I have several business computers on XP that are too resource-deficient to upgrade. My proprietary software won’t run on anything else. I am closing my small business in June, so only need it to run up till then. After that, it’s the recycle center for them all. Just don’t want MS pushing “the Kill-Button” on them and putting my business out-of-business before I am ready...