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Katamori

Brace yourselves, Windows XP end of support is coming!

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Ah, still that old wives tale. I thought it was common knowledge by now that the April 2014 date is not set in stone, at least for corporate users. Those will be able to enjoy an extended support period up to June 2015, and, lo' and behold, some governments are even considering using taxpayers' money to secure their own windows XP support. Windows XP embedded will "live on" until 2016, at least, too.

http://redmondmag.com/articles/2014/02/19/windows-xp-embedded-support.aspx

The April 2014 date is "definitive" for home users, though there's no telling if some corporate-commisioned fixes or even a SP4 won't "trickle down" to home users too, in due time. BTW, MS should consider making a "final SP4 anyway, as even SP3 is way too outdated now, and a "fresh" SP3 install will download no less than 100 updates, weighting-in at more than 200 MB. That calls for a SP4, IMO.

If not, there's always the possibility of a Windows XP China edition *grin*

Also, even for home users, MS just cannot afford to cause about a quarter of the world's computer to become security liabilities:

http://www.infoworld.com/t/microsoft-windows/microsoft-extends-xp-anti-malware-support-until-july-2015-234374

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Isn't it great living in the past?


I retired my last XP machine in 2007 because it got way too slow for my daily use. I still have it but only for emergency purposes.

If you decide to stick to it, please don't complain if software stops working over time. Trust me, it will happen with ever more projects not bothering anymore because it means that they'd have to miss out on newer OS features if they keep XP compatibility.


And this Win8 resistance is truly ridiculous. Ok, 8.0 may be a total failure, but with 8.1 there's only a few tweaks needed to get it into a nice working state.

I wouldn't have seen any reason to upgrade from 7, though, hadn't it been for the need to be able to run development tools for the Windows store and Windows Phone.


As for the FUD about retiring the desktop, I think some people have to actually think this through to see how utterly ludicrous it is.
Remember: The 'Metro' interface can only be used by Windows Store apps which are severely limited in what they can do. Would Microsoft really limit Windows to this it'd mean that most specialized corporate software would stop working without any chance to migrate (since none of this software is being sold to regular retail channels.)

And fortunately the main decisionmakers of this disaster no longer work at Microsoft.

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Graf Zahl said:

Isn't it great living in the past?


It's greater to live in the future, but with the familiarity and reliability of the past ;-)

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Graf Zahl, you misunderstand me. I don't wanna live in the past, but I don't have much choices.

As I mentioned, my computer is not strong enough to run Win7 properly - 1 GB of RAM...most of that would be used by the OS so the whole system would be slower. I guess at least.

The worst is that I have a terrible financial background, so I don't really have money for a system upgrade. Actually, my PC is the only computer around me, and even this is a 2008 configuration. Every single hardware is the same in it. (except the power supply)

Also, at the beginning of the year, my HDD that contained the system files was crashed, and it wasn't easy to recover, so after 1 month of agony, I had to reinstall the system, and its every single programs and applications.

Seriously, I had enough of that. I don't want to do that again, I just want to play, and surfing on the Internet, and stuff like that, without reinstalling anything again. That's damn annoying.
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Anyway, what do you know about security problems, guys? Will my OS be less safe after the expiration of the official support?

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Doubtful that security issues would arise, and even if they were they probably wouldn't be a major threat.

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Maes said:

Also, even for home users, MS just cannot afford to cause about a quarter of the world's computer to become security liabilities

As I stated in my last post. I'm a little doubtful of the >25% figure often cited. If you look at Steam's hardware survey or even Wikipedia's usage share. I would think for home users the actual number is <10%.

As for the SP4 idea, I'm fairly sure I said in the last thread on the topic that they won't do that since their support policy states that products will be supported for some amount of time after the last SP. (5 years IIRC.) So it definitely won't be called SP4 if they even wanted to do that. More realistically, I expect such a thing to come from the community at a later time like what happened to Windows 98SE. Probably including the updates pulled from server 2003 and Windows Embedded as well.

Katamori said:

Anyway, what do you know about security problems, guys? Will my OS be less safe after the expiration of the official support?

I will defer to someone more well versed on security, but from what I know most attacks are done through the applications that you run and not the OS itself. So as long as your web browser, flash, java, your AV, etc are providing security updates, you should be fine. If you're using Microsoft software, such as IE, then you'll definitely want to switch to something else.

The reason this is larger concern for business users is that they may be using Windows XP on servers, or using other Microsoft services that will not be getting security updates after the 8th.

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Concerning security, all I need to remind of is an early XP vulnerability that caused the system to get infected just by connecting to the internet without any action to be required by the user.

Should anyone find something similar in the last XP version it'd mean 'game over'. About the likelihood of such an event, it's very hard to speculate. I wouldn't consider it a major issue after 13 years of XP.

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My system's product key starts with "FCKGW"; I haven't had support since 2001.

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The only thing I'm concerned about is pcs evolving to a point where vanilla doom won't work on it. I'm not sure we're anywhere near that point but I suspect it will come some day in the next 20-30 years

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40oz said:

The only thing I'm concerned about is pcs evolving to a point where vanilla doom won't work on it. I'm not sure we're anywhere near that point but I suspect it will come some day in the next 20-30 years.

Is there anything wrong with using DOSBox or whatever else comes along by then? I honestly don't see this as much of an issue, hardware changes over time, no reason to support legacy software, cool as some of it may be. Emulators will probably be a lot better by then too, especially so for newer systems that either haven't been fully cracked and/or demand a lot out of today's consumer grade machines. Something like Gamecube and PS2 emulation should work a lot better in ten or fifteen years than it does now.

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Graf Zahl said:

Concerning security, all I need to remind of is an early XP vulnerability that caused the system to get infected just by connecting to the internet without any action to be required by the user.

I remember one time when I reinstalled XP, because of all sorts of malware/virus.. As soon as windows had started, the desktop was bombarded with gayporn popups. Fortunately I was able to remove that virus easily without having to reinstall again...

It was so weird and unexpected.

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Oh cmon you all know that XP will live on despite your little, petty grudge against it, because why fixin' what ain't broken, amirite? ;-)

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Sodaholic said:

That's pretty surreal, seeing a well known field in a different state. I take it the image is supposed imply that XP has dried up?

I was more intending the gif as XP coming towards the end of its life rather than "drying up" as such, though that could mean much the same thing. The original Autumn/Fall image was taken in 2006.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliss_%28image%29

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fraggle said:

I love this. They should issue a final Windows XP update to change the default background to this.

Don't you feel that sounds a bit tragic?

Graf Zahl said:

Concerning security, all I need to remind of is an early XP vulnerability that caused the system to get infected just by connecting to the internet without any action to be required by the user.

God, that happened to us too.

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Dunno why some people see that picture as tragic, it's not like all that vegetation is dead or something.

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Memfis said:

Dunno why some people see that picture as tragic, it's not like all that vegetation is dead or something.

It kinda looks like it at low resolution. It'd be better if it actually was.

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fraggle said:

So it is, thanks. Most of the brown stuff is trellised vines, which is going to be difficult to work sprites into.

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Katamori said:

As I mentioned, my computer is not strong enough to run Win7 properly - 1 GB of RAM...most of that would be used by the OS so the whole system would be slower. I guess at least.

Nah. In my experience, Win7 runs at a comparable speed to XP on the same hardware (including the netbook I'm typing on right now, with 1GB RAM and a 1.6 GHz Atom CPU). Continued use may see an advantage to Win7, unless you clean your XP system vigilantly. Win7 only seems to use more resources because of advanced precaching, which keeps programs in memory so they launch faster. I endorse this guide:
http://www.blackviper.com/2009/10/01/black-vipers-windows-7-super-tweaks/

Win7 SP1 seems to have slowed this machine down when playing YT videos or having lots of apps open. Then again, this is a netbook with Intel graphics; you probably have a discrete card and a beefier CPU so that'll make a difference. If you have the money - full versions go for about US$100 - and your hardware is supported, it's worth it.

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Memfis said:

Dunno why some people see that picture as tragic, it's not like all that vegetation is dead or something.

By itself it's not tragic, it's the combination with the event that's a sign.

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Sometimes I seriously wonder how you people would have survived back in the day when a computer became basically obsolete in a few weeks. Now there's a gigantic uproar when people have to upgrade once every 10 years.

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Me!

Well, kind of. I have a couple of old computers sitting around that aren't worth upgrading to a newer OS and one of those machines is still in pretty regular use.

At work, however, a significant number of the computers are still on XP and I just had confirmed that the one in my room is unlikely to be changed in the next round of upgrades. The version of I.E. it runs is so old that half of the websites I visit don't work any more because they expect a newer browser. :?

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I've been using an out of date, unpatched copy of XP SP2 for about 3 years now on my main setup, and not a single thing has gone wrong. Fuck all the alarmist propaganda.

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I'm running XP Home on a couple of 5 year old desktops and a laptop that's too old to consider upgrading. I'll probably shove new hardware into the desktops later in the year and update them to Win 7 Home Premium.

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I run xp sp3 on my main pc, dont see a reason to upgrade to win7 or 8. I'll continue to use it. I never relied on m$ for upgrades before, i wont now.

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Graf Zahl said:

Concerning security, all I need to remind of is an early XP vulnerability that caused the system to get infected just by connecting to the internet without any action to be required by the user.

HAHA! That happened to me twice. The second time as soon as I got my PC back from the shop and connected.

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