XP's retirement will be hacker heaven

Diosoth said:

1) having an older OS on hand may be necessary to run certain older programs, especially games. Not every old game will run on new Windows, not everyone knows DOSbox(which doesn't run everything anyway) and DOSbox doe snot have 100% support.

In case you didn't notice, all surveys talking about how much XP boxes are still around aren't done by divination or massive telephone questioning campaign, but by examining the logs of a bunch of important websites, and extracting the data they collected about the user. THis for example. Yes, it's your browser that broadcasts this data, tells OS, browser version, approximate geographical location, and even more if allows tracking services and scripts (to disallow that you need addons that do it, like Ghostery or Noscript).

So yeah, they don't have XP just to run some legacy stuff and oldish games. THey use it to do the most dangerous thing they could do with it.

It's funny that people are insisting XP users upgrade, not only for this but many other reasons, yet I go to a Windows 8 thread and it's full of people saying they'd never upgrade 7 to 8 for any reason.

Well, XP is at the end of its life, without updates it's an open door. And w8 sucks.

As for the updates, well... I've seen so many issues with the updates from this month and last month that I wonder if MS is testing these updates before they go live. They're so focused on 8 that it seems they don't care much if the patches for 7 and XP even work properly, and a patch that causes BSODs, slow performance or your genuine registration to no longer register aren't positive updates.

Simulating all possible combinations of hardware and software of 600+ million computers they have no control on is not possible at all. It ain't Apple dev team, that know exactly all their products.

They do what they can.

Updates were problematic only for a very limited amount of users. (like me) but not for most of others, as you can see even in the thread about that.
There may be a lot of complaints, but just because there are a lot of PCs running 7 in the first place. their % is tiny.

I only updated to XP about three years ago, and 7 one year ago for hardware and software compatibility reasons. Before that I was using 2000.

If it weren't for updating my hardware and software, I'd still be running XP, or maybe even 2000 without issue (I liked the classic 2000 look better than the needlessly bubbly look and color scheme of XP). Loved the firewall I had for those versions of Windows as well.

Anyway, I'm 99% certain that running XP and going on-line with it after it is no longer supported by Microsoft wouldn't have been an issue at all for me. I haven't been infected with a virus or the like since before 2000, nor have I been "hacked" (at least to my knowledge - which is probably worth more than most of you might likely think).

I also only use the unlocked administrator account on my home computers, as there's no real reason for me not to.

Most other people still seem to have 50+ iterations and/or types of viruses or malware on their home/personal computers these days, regardless of which version of Windows they're using.

That being said, this doesn't mean that I don't recommend that other people (PC user "civilians") update to a supported Windows OS.

Besides, Windows 7 is a pretty great OS in its own rights, and the Aero theme is nice as well (this coming from someone who prefers the classic 2000 look to the XP bubble look).

I suspect a lot of modern malware fails to run in Windows 2000.

Point is that as windows 2000 userbase declined, so did the amount of development of malware for it.

For XP on the other hand...

Also, bulk of malware I see on laptops I have to clean up spreads through social engineering and the usual old tricks to fool a naive user.
So yeah, most people with passable IT experience tend to spot the trap from afar (and/or avoid suspicious sites and software alltogether) and get a lot less infections regardless of the OS.

Lady Fitzgerald said:

Diosoth said:

...It's funny that people are insisting XP users upgrade, not only for this but many other reasons, yet I go to a Windows 8 thread and it's full of people saying they'd never upgrade 7 to 8 for any reason...

That's because Win 7 is nowhere near its EOL (01/14/2020); XP is (04/08/2014). By the time Win 7 approaches its EOL, I'm hoping (more like praying) that M$ will have an OS out that is better than Win 8. Otherwise, I'll be taking a hard look at something like Linux.

Agree %100 Lady Fitzgerald, I have 1 Windows 7 desktop and two Linux desktops I like Linux a lot :)

On my home PC, I pretty much just use "Google Office" (as it were) these days. Granted, I'm sure that isn't really an option for a lot of people, both professionally and personally.

I play a fair amount of games and run some software (and likely hardware) that I'd have a hard time getting to work in Linux. I'm not opposed to Linux at all, and actually really like some aspects of it, as well as messing around with it. I just don't think it's currently feasible to use it as my main OS. Fortunately I don't really need to make that tough choice, since Windows 7 works so well for me. But if things keep progressing the way they have been with Windows and Microsoft, it'll be something for me to consider more seriously using as my main OS. (I've been messing around more recently with Debian 7.1 "Wheezy," and some modifications/customizations with it, mostly just for fun, but also to see how it's progressing and to educate myself on it. Still some work to be done on that last bit there, I'm sure.)