The clock is ticking for XP users, with Microsoft ending support with its final security update after 11 years on April 8, 2014. Netmarketshare’s desktop browser statistics show 40% of users are still using XP, totalling about 500 million users (versus Windows 7 at 45% and Vista at 6%). Gartner and Forrester analysts predict that 10% to 20% of enterprise PCs will be running XP after April 2014. Options for companies include: speed up XP conversions, sign up for Microsoft’s Custom Support Program for after-retirement support, and add a supported browser to XP to replace unsupported IE8.
If I recall correctly, Windows XP came out in the autumn of 2001, so April 2014 would be 12.5 years.
It did. Not sure how such a basic mistake got through.
Maybe 11 years from 2001 to 2012? (but that’s not what they said, is it).
Hope Microsoft doesn’t see that as a migration to Flat UI 8, we, under our license terms will stop at Windows 7 or finish the migration to Linux
Its fine, Microsoft has already sold 40 million Windows 8 licenses in a month. (fyi Windows 7 sold 60 million in two months).
So much for the failure, or the sweeping rejection of Metro by the masses, or the year of the Desktop Linux.
There’s always next year guys.
There’s lots of ways to play those numbers. 40 million licenses sold does not mean that 40 million upgrades and computers with preinstalled copies have been sold, lots of them could be still sitting on the shelf.
And that is relevant to this article, how? We’re not even talking about sales, we’re talking about IT departments running outdated software. Look, I know you love Microsoft, but at least shill intelligently. A proper shill here would’ve been something like: “Some enterprises are already considering upgrading to Windows 8.” That might even be true, though I doubt it.
XP itself isn’t even the problem, it’s IE6. Yes, this is a problem and no, I’m not referring to IE6’s security issues which are too numerous to count. The trouble is that a huge number of in-house software has been written for it, and the IT department does not want to invest the time it would take to re-write it. The IE6/ActiveX combination is firmly entrenched in some places, and upgrading Windows is therefore not an option. Compatibility mode won’t cut it, and you can’t get IE6 for Windows any later than XP. Therefore, XP is likely to stay where it is. You can blame it on Microsoft, or incompetent IT managers, or stingy management. In the end, it doesn’t matter who wins the blame game. The situation isn’t likely to change until change is absolutely force upon them. This means, among other things, that Microsoft would have to refuse to allow after-life support of XP and IE6. Not charge them extra, or re-negotiate the contract, but outright refuse. Ending support is about the only way to force these places to upgrade, as it means they can’t call someone and bitch when something doesn’t work anymore. IT departments love to pass the buck whenever they can.
It’s not just the applications though. We have customers who right now, are looking at moving from IE6 to IE8 – they want us to certify that the old version of our app they’re running will still work. And it will – from experience with other clients, all we need to do is do some testing, and fix a few small bugs.
But the point is that it’s almost 2013, and they’re finally looking at upgrading – to IE8. And the reason for that is that they’re going to be upgrading their desktops to Windows 7 in the near future, and they want to certify IE8 because they can move to that on their existing XP desktops, and keep using it on 7. I’d give it another year before they ask us to certify IE9, seeing as that’s obsolete now as well.
Edit: I should also note that they only moved to XP after their Windows 2000 desktops went end-of-life, and even then, it was about a year later…
Edited 2012-11-29 00:46 UTC
Who is we? Last I checked, I didn’t reply to your comment.
My comment was in response to Lorin being a blowhard over Windows 8 and saying he’s migrating a billion PCs or something away from Windows (Right, lol)
Despite all the Metro hate, the countless OSAlert smear articles, the grandstanding in the comments over every little detail, there is no evidence to suggest that Windows 8 is a commercial failure anywhere NEAR the scale that some of you are delusional enough to believe is inevitable.
It was about a quarter of a million last time I checked. What happened in reality is that he converted his mother’s computer to linux.
Manipulated numbers, most are sold to oem and retail suppliers so most are sitting idle, Microsoft counts those as sales.
Manipulated numbers?
Are you kidding? They have not changed the ways numbers are reported from Windows Vista and Windows 7.
You know Microsoft is a publicly traded company, so manipulation on the scale that you’re implying is illegal. It is telling that you’d suggest that there is foul play at hand. It can’t possibly be that, you know, Windows 8 is the disaster that OSAlert armchair CEOs predicted it would be.
Is Windows 7’s marketshare manipulated numbers too? Because that’s the consequence of Windows 7’s licensing sales (which are reported in the same manner Windows 8’s are)
I remember the first time I saw XP, it was in my campus, and the first thing that came to my mind was “Is Windows 2000 with a new skin”.
You could add some drama by explicitly stating that by now, you have several years of professional experience.
Most of my colleagues and classmates complained about the “Fisher Price GUI” (look at all those bright colours and large icons) when we first saw XP. The first thing everyone did was to disable Luna and switch to the Classic skin.
Pretty much the same reaction we’re all having to UI-formally-known-as-Metro. Unfortunately, there’s no way to disable that one.
Actually, there is
The skinning engine is still there in Windows 8 and you can install a replacement start menu (several good apps out at this point) to never have to mess with Metro, if you hate it.
I still have an old machine running XP. I’m not so concerned about the de-support as I am about running anti-malware on it. It’s a uniprocessor P-4 that just doesn’t have the horsepower to run most current anti-malware efficiently. Adaware and Avast! are examples. The thing can’t run them with sufficient speed to make them practical.
Any ideas for other antimalware I can use (that has real-time support?)
I can run Malwarebytes and Clamwin but these do not have real-time support.
Microsoft Security Essentials
Thanks for the suggestion, but I don’t trust MSE because MS has an incentive to mess up my system (namely to force me to upgrade). They seem to try so many tactics to get users to upgrade that I wouldn’t put this past them at some point.
Really? You are that paranoid? You need to get checked. There is literally 0 incentive for MS to mess up your machine. They would, A, get found out and be sued – big time, and B, They would get found out and sued – big time.
If you really don’t want to run MSE for whatever reason (you know, Microsoft essentially already has root access on your Win machine, via Windows Update) – NOD32 was always very light, suitable for older machines; F-Prot similar, IIRC; though both not free.
Avira was also rather light last time I used it, and free (but it seems it has some gotchas now http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avira#Problems )
Or you might always try http://clamsentinel.sourceforge.net/
Malwarebytes does have a real-time component in its Pro version.
It’s not IE8 that’s the big issue with XP, but IE6. In particular, company/government intranets using IE6-only sites (e.g. ancient ActiveX nonsense which were a bad idea 10 years ago, never mind now).
It means anyone doing Web work on those organisations’ intranet or internet sites still have to test/design against IE6 so that the orgs’ own users can see the new site, which ought to be a crime in this day and age. It doesn’t help that there isn’t an IE6 compatibility mode in later IE’s either, which is another reason IE6 has hung around like a bad smell for so long.
As ever, it’s all Microsoft’s fault for extending support for a desktop OS for so long. Yes, we can blame the rotten Vista for part of that, but should a company support a desktop OS that long regardless? Servers make sense to me because they probably have a longer upgrade cycle due to the expense of replacing them, but this isn’t the case for desktops.
One thing that surprised me was how long Microsoft took to start making its non-OS products non-compatible with XP – this is one way to accelerate the adoption of later Windows releases.
Edited 2012-11-28 07:50 UTC
IE6 isn’t as much as a problem as you might think. There is browsium, which basically lets you run IE6 as a plugin to later versions of IE.
Microsoft have enterprise customers that is why they have these massively long support cycles.
Not to mention, Windows 7 Pro includes XPMode, which gives you an XP install in a VM with seamless integration for installed apps. Meaning, you can run IE6 via XPMode just like any other application. You can even run IE9 (Windows 7) alongside IE6 (XPMode).
We use XPMode everyday to run Simply Accounting 2003, which will not install on Windows 7.
Edited 2012-11-28 16:36 UTC
I had forgotten about that.
Ehhh, I’m fairly sure you would criticise them much more in the case of too short support…
I work full time for a local government (law enforcement) office, and our county IT department has a fetish for staying with XP despite the coming loss of support (I’m guessing they are afraid to continue their education on modern OSes, though I don’t blame them for avoiding Vista). In most of the county offices, their solution is to use a virtual machine setup to sandbox everyone, running a stripped down XP image on the server that users must log into to be able to work.
That works fine for most users, but in my particular office we must have a secure VPN to the state’s crime index, and that isn’t feasible with the VM setup. Therefore, we are running native XP machines from 2004 that use IE8, and connect to the outside world on a separate network from the rest of the county.
Recently the state has issued stricter guidelines for access to their network, and my boss came to me for suggestions on new equipment and software to meet these guidelines. I wrote up a simple preliminary estimate for three computers with modest specs and Windows 7 (which IT so far sees as no man’s land) and submitted it to her. When she forwarded it to IT, the response was something like “why are you bringing us this unproven, untested and overblown recommendation from someone we don’t know and can’t confirm that he knows what he is doing”.
Needless to say, my boss was pissed. She knows that I know my stuff, which was why she came to me with the sheriff’s blessing (he knows my qualifications too). So, the sheriff is going to do an end run around IT, since the workstations we have to upgrade don’t access their network anyway. Basically, we have to do this or stop accessing the state network, which of course can’t happen; it’s what my department exists for.
I simply can’t understand this culture of sticking with outdated and vulnerable software at all costs. Our IT department really needs a regime change, but I’m just a peon in the county so I have no say in that. Just one more thing pushing me towards going full time at my other job.
Ow…. I thought OUR IT Department was bad (I work at a university)but they at least are now migrating to Windows7 –
IT Departments are the last strongholds of Microsoft I think. The rest of the world is switching to OSX, iOS and Android – and of course there are the smart guys like me who prefer Linux
I imagine you never had the pleasure of using UNIX, VAX systems managed by the IT department.
“If it mostly works, why disrupt it?” taken a bit too far? It still seems closer to an ideal situation & easier to correct than if you’d have an upgrade-happy environment…
I made the switch to Xubuntu six months ago, best decision I ever made. After you get over that ‘3 day hump’ you are fine. Whomever said gaming isn’t for Linux users, I disagree. I been having a blast and have amassed quite a collection of native games.
RC Mini Racers was just released, it’s like a Revolt clone. Been having lots of fun with that. I never used any Office products so that wasn’t a problem for me. Sure I miss some of my games, but they were very old and I found substitutes.
I was a hardcore MS user since 1998. I had zero problems making the switch. Just ditch your MS partition and move that out of your head. I don’t why people bash Linux so much, it’s silliness, I guess they are afraid.
If you can switch from XP to 8 then you can damn well switch from XP to Linux. No more excuses because I did it. We just need to get rid of the Old hats who think all the software we use in Linux NEEDS to be free and Open, that’s what’s holding Linux back.
Depends on your definition of “get rid of the Old hats…”. Mind clarifying which old hats you’re talking about?
1. The ones making platform design decisions that are hostile to closed-source software? Good luck finding any.
I’ve bought a ton of Humble Indie Bundles and some games off Desura and the only problem I’ve ever run into is situations where one game requires PulseAudio while another causes it to go crazy.
(And, 99% of the time, that was fixed by teaching the devs that PulseAudio isn’t as universal and stable as lennartp told them and suggesting a wrapper like OpenAL instead. The other 1%, I run the Windows version in Wine… which is one of the things that causes PulseAudio to go nuts.)
2. Users who refuse to run closed-source software? Good luck with that.
I have a strict policy that, aside from games (which are too “disposable” to be refined slowly over a decade) the only closed-source allowed on my system is my BIOS (and BIOS != UEFI), my nVidia binary drivers, Flash (until H.264 vs. WebM is settled), Skype (until WebRTC matures), and the copy of Opera I use to test my creations.
…and I’m not an “old hat”. I’ve only been running Linux since part-way through the WinXP lifecycle (less than 10 years) and demand open-source for the same reason I don’t run Steam: I prefer to have the power to fix my own problems and hate companies having me by the balls.
3. Developers who refuse to write closed-source software for Linux because they think nobody will use it? I’m all for that.
Goodness knows there are enough old Humble Bundle games that only receive updates for the Windows and Mac ports because their devs don’t give a damn.
Edited 2012-11-28 12:40 UTC
Support is a tricky term. We have 16 year old Solaris boxes that we still pay the vendor for “support”. We will call the vendor for “support” and they tell us one of two things: 1: Upgrade to a recent version, or 2: Give us 6 weeks to find parts then we’ll see what happens. Most vendorss will gladly take your money and call it “support”, even though they have no intention of actually supporting anything. So if you lose XP support, what have you actually lost? My employer still runs XP, because it is too costly to upgrade all the desktops. Microsoft will gladly take money to “support” us, which will probably mean they will tell us to upgrade should we ever call. I can tell them to upgrade for free, but I’m not a vendor…
For those customers that bought XP x64 when released, how long support will they have? (released 2005)
64-bit XP is XP in name only. It’s really a bastardised Windows Server 2003 with some extra GUI bits added in to make it “look’n feel” like XP. The less everyone talks about it, the better.
Just let it disappear into the closet, never to be seen again.
I liked it …
Hell, I loved Windows Server 2003 as a workstation. It was rock-solid and with some tweaks you could even play games on it. I think, collectively, I used it more than I used XP during the mid 2000s.
Time traveler? i didnt know we were at ~2500 yet. show how off i am. i can hardly remember day of the week, eve less the dates.
Okay, so how else should I represent the middle years of the first decade of the current century then? I really doubt anyone else was confused by what I wrote.
Mid-noughties?
No, they were definitely very naughty.
Wait…
XP64 was IIRC always getting updates in concert with 2003 (XP64 being a sort of “2003 Workstation”, more related to 2k3 than to XP32) – maybe check the future support life cycle for 2k3?
Oh no, only 500 more days. How will my computer function without proper Microsoft support???
[rolls eyes]
The Win98 and Win2k kernel projects on MSFN prove that there is life after EOL.
Why does Microsoft allow extended support for XP to drag on for so long? With the large majority of businesses dependent on Windows, shouldn’t they have enough clout to force the issue, by killing off support for XP a lot sooner and a lot of businesses would have to upgrade, simply because they need Microsoft and don’t have much alternative.
Edited 2012-11-30 16:42 UTC
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