Wednesday 4 September 2013

Microsoft is Ending Support for Windows XP in 2014: What You Need to Know

MICROSOFT GETS READY TO PULL THE LIFE SUPPORT ON WINDOWS XP...




YesCon Tech - Today marks the first day of the last year of Windows XP’s long and storied life.
On April 8, 2014, Microsoft will officially stop supporting Windows XP, meaning there will be no more security updates or other patches. When April 2014 rolls around Microsoft will have supported Windows XP for nearly 12 years.
Should you chose not to upgrade before next year, you will be, in Microsoft’s words “at your own risk” in dealing with security vulnerability and any potential malware designed to exploit them.
According to NetMarketShare, just over 38 percent of PCs connected to the web are still running Windows XP. Given that current XP users have already ignored three OS upgrades, it seems reasonable to assume a significant number of XP diehards still won’t upgrade even now that Microsoft is no longer issuing security updates — all of which adds up to a potentially huge number of vulnerable PCs connected to the web.


Starting around this time next year expect black hat hackers to have a botnet fire sale.
With so many suddenly vulnerable PCs on the web, it’s really only a matter of time before unpatched vulnerabilities are identified and exploited, which could mean a serious uptick in the amount of botnet spam or worse — imagine even a small percentage of those 38 percent of PCs being harnessed for distributed denial of service attacks.
For individual users upgrading Windows XP shouldn’t be too difficult, barring a dependency on software that’s never been updated. If Windows 7 or 8 aren’t to your liking there’s always Linux (I suggest starting with Mint Linux if you’re new to Linux).
Upgrading enterprise and government installations is somewhat more difficult. Microsoft puts the matter quite bluntly on the Windows blog: “If your organization has not started the migration to a modern desktop, you are late.”
The Windows blog post contains quite a few links designed to help anyone looking to upgrade, but at the enterprise/government level it may well be too late anyway. “Based on historical customer deployment data,” says Microsoft, “the average enterprise deployment can take 18 to 32 months from business case through full deployment.”
Windows XP isn’t the only Microsoft product that will be getting the heave-ho this time next year. Internet Explorer 6 on XP, Office 2003, Exchange Server 2003 and Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 2 (newer service packs of Exchange Server 2010 are still supported) will all be cast adrift. It’s also worth noting that this affects virtual machines as well, so if you’ve got a Windows XP virtual machine for testing websites, well, be careful out there.


If You Still Need XP
You shouldn’t keep using XP. It will become more and more unsecure over time as more security vulnerabilities are found and not patched. Finding new hardware that supports XP will be difficult if your current hardware breaks down or needs to be upgraded. New software may stop supporting XP and you may be stuck with older, outdated, and also unsecure versions of software. Current versions of Mozilla Firefox no longer support Windows 98 – Firefox users on Windows 98 are using an unsecure version of Firefox.
If you have old software that only works on XP, you should consider upgrading to a modern version of Windows and running Windows XP in a virtual machine. Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate editions of Windows 7 include a “Windows XP Mode” feature for easily running a Windows XP virtual machine. This will help increase your security by allowing you to use a modern, supported, secure operating system on your computer while confining the unsecure, unsupported XP to a virtual machine.
You should already be using antivirus software on your Windows XP systems, but this will become even more important when Windows XP starts to become the security equivalent of swiss cheese. Some security companies may jump in with solutions to secure increasingly vulnerable legacy XP systems, but you’re much better off upgrading.
If your organization has a Windows XP deployment, you should already be working on migrating to a new version of Windows. If you’re a home user, you should be looking at upgrading, too. Most longtime Windows XP users generally agree that Windows 7 is a worthy upgrade (Windows 8 is more controversial), and Microsoft will be supporting Windows 7 until 2020.
Let’s be honest: You won’t find an operating system vendor that supports their desktop operating system for as long as Microsoft supported XP. But, if you’re really upset, you can always switch to Linux instead. Just leave XP behind!

The article above was originally published on, Microsoft is Ending Support for Windows XP in 2014: What You Need to Know  by How-To Geek and Scott Gilbertson of webmonkey.com
Image Credits: How-To Geek, Microsoft and webmonkey

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