The end of XP support ........... in 3 years.

8^th of April 2014

This is the date that Microsoft will stop supporting Windows XP. Microsoft even made a gadget that you can stick on your desktop that counts down to the date that they throw XP under the bus. A little tacky in my humble opinion, but whatever floats their boat. They have done this to the rest of their old operating systems and XP has lasted much longer than I think even Microsoft had planned. The funny thing is that computers have really reached a point over the past 10 years that any kind of improvements that they make in them really can’t be seen by the average user. Does your word processor really work faster than it did 10 years ago? I will have to admit that my 10 year old laptop doesn’t really do that great with HD video however my 10 year old desktop with a 3 GHZ Pentium 4, 2 GB of RAM, XP, and a nice video card does, and it plays games great too.

So what does it really mean when they say they are not going to support XP? Well, they should stop updating Windows, security holes won’t be fixed, so it might not be good to hook an XP computer to the internet, if you don’t hook it to the internet then it doesn’t matter. I have one laptop with a dual processor and 4 GB of RAM that is running XP, I could upgrade it to Windows 7 if I wanted to. Or I could run Linux on any machine that hooks up to the internet and have a secure connection and a fast running machine.  I guess my point is that your computers will still be good enough to use, you will just have to make some decisions on whether to do some sort of operating system change so you can keep on trucking with the machine that you have. Or go down to Best Buy and pick up something new at a cost of $300 to $2000 and turn your old machine into a server, give it to charity, or sell it on ebay.

While I have your attention if you have a desktop computer and you haven’t vacuumed it out lately (or ever), then take this time now to shut it down, open the case, and vacuum all of the accumulated dirt out of it. Do a good job so it will last until 2014. Electronic circuits don’t like dirt, it tends to cause shorts and make your system get hot. You don’t want to be forced to go to Best Buy do you?

So basically don’t sweat it, let’s see what happens in 3 years.

Dan