XP gone in 2014

[Kenny]

Microsoft Will Officially Pull The Plug On Windows XP In One Year

On April 8, 2014, Microsoft will officially retire Windows XP, the company's most popular version of Windows ever, first launched about 12 years ago.
That doesn't mean if you have XP running on some old computer that it will stop working. It does mean that Microsoft will no longer be issuing security patches and updates for XP. So, if hackers find news ways to break into XP, Microsoft won't stop them.

Microsoft's Erwin Visser made a plea on the Windows blog about it. He told businesses that they don't even have to upgrade their PCs to Windows 8, they can just upgrade to Windows 7 if they want.

There are still a lot of XP machines out there and not all of them are a decade old. Microsoft allows businesses to downgrade their operating system to any version they want, as long as it's a version that's still supported by Microsoft.

Even today a business can buy a new Windows machine and put XP on it. They do that because they have critical apps that work well with XP, but not great with Windows 7 or 8.

Some 39 percent of the PCs using the Internet these days are using XP, according to Net Marketshare. That compares to about 45 percent using Windows 7 and about 3% using Windows 8. (More PCs actually use Windows Vista at about 5%.)

Many of these XP machines are being used by small businesses, so Microsoft is trying to convince them to upgrade by offering them a 15 percent discount on Windows 8 and Office Standard 2013, if both products are purchased together by June 30, Microsoft says.

The only thing they have done right since SE2...
XP acually works, so many proggys run stable, and as the article mentions, 39% of the boxes online are using XP (which could be why they are stopping support, to get you to spend).

This is why I started the Win 8 thread last month.. to see what I can use after all these years with XP.

It's not like Uncle Bill needs the $ .... Oh well.

Peace,
Cy

 

[Kenny]

Is Windows 9 Microsoft’s secret weapon to get people to dump XP?

http://news.yahoo.com/windows-9-microsoft-secret-weapon-people-dump-xp-131040195.html

As we mentioned earlier this week, Microsoft has a problem because a huge chunk of Windows XP stragglers still aren’t upgrading to Windows 7 or Windows 8 even though there’s just over a month to go until XP support ends. Tom’s Hardware writes that Microsoft does have one more card to play that it hopes will finally convince XP diehards to switch: Windows 9.
Microsoft knows that Windows 8 is a nonstarter for many XP users, which is why it’s apparently designed Windows 9 with the desktop user much more in mind. The company began its efforts to appease desktop PC users with Windows 8.1 — which added back a Start button and the option of booting up to desktop — and it’s only going to further down this road with its next major release.

“Windows 8.1, launched in October 2013, definitely made the platform feel more like a single unit than the previous Desktop/Modern UI double-feature,” Tom’s Hardware writes. “Windows 8.1 GDR1, scheduled to launch in April, will supposedly help merge the two together. Windows 9? Even more.”

Tom’s Hardware also points out that Dell marketing exec Margaret Franco recently said that her company’s customers are expressing “a lot more interest around developing the transition strategy for their OS” in anticipation of Windows 9.

Of course, there’s one problem here: Windows 9 won’t launch until the fall of 2014 at the very earliest and has been tipped to launch as late as the spring of 2015. In the time between April and Windows 9′s eventual release, XP users are going to get swamped with all manner of fun zero-day attacks by malware developers who have had XP’s impending death on their radars for years. If that can’t convince them to finally dump XP, it’s doubtful there’s anything Windows 9 could do to change their minds either.

Peace,
Cy