Windows XP support officially ends after 13 years →
Microsoft officially ended Windows XP support today, including security updates.
Despite advanced notice of the decision, the 13-year-old XP is still used on almost a third of all personal computers worldwide.
What could possibly go wrong?
Rosemayre Barry of London-based business, The Pet Chip Company, is one manager who is puzzled and more than a little annoyed that she has been faced with the XP dilemma.
“XP has been excellent,” she says. “I’m very put out. When you purchase a product you don’t expect it to be discontinued, especially when it’s one of [Microsoft’s] most used products.”
Microsoft has the best customers.
When Windows XP was released in 2001, I was 19 years old. I had just started my second year of college and was learning C, carrying a Palm Vx, and playing Max Payne on my brand new, self-built Windows PC with a 1.33 GHz Athlon, GeForce 3, and two of IBM’s notorious Deathstar drives in RAID-0 (which turned out as you’d expect). I was even still fruitlessly using Rogaine rather than accepting my hair’s fate (it was pretty bad even at 19), which was almost as stupid as having two Deathstars in RAID-0 with minimal backups. Weezer had only released one terrible album so far, while American Hi-Fi and Jimmy Eat World were brand new.
That was a long time ago. We’ve all moved on. Microsoft should be allowed to move on, too.
I don’t know how they can, though. I still see the even older Windows 2000 in widespread use, usually in government and big, boring businesses like banks and hospitals. (Windows 2000 was fantastic at the time, but to give you an idea of what that time was, the first computer I ran it on had approximately the same CPU power, and exactly the same amount of RAM, as the first iPhone.)
People just don’t care to upgrade. Windows XP still “works” for them, and the upgrades are different, which is bad. Can Microsoft really stop issuing security patches? I guess they have to at some point, but this is how botnets start.