Windows XP Support to End April 8, 2014
Ok, all you Windows XP owners, including me, Microsoft will no longer be supporting twelve year old XP as of April 8, 2014. What this means is that XP will no longer get any updates. They will continu...
Forum Discussion
I'm an IT manager with a very large financial services company. We're Just finishing a major 3-year project to upgrade all of our machines (better than 10,000 of them) from XP to Windows 7. As noted by Gdetrailer above, the real 'heavy lifting' for this project wasn't upgrading the desktops/laptops themselves. It was the remediation of the better than 200 older applications that would need to run on the Windows 7 operating system. Why did we make the investment? First, there was the security concerns related to the availability or security patches going away. Second was the future ability to run new applications as well as upgrades to existing applications. Windows 7 was an almost complete re-write of the operating system over XP, including a move to a 64-bit OS. Some software vendors of the type we purchase from will no longer develop on the 32-bit, XP platform. Third is performance. Windows 7 simply runs better than XP for our business. Personally, I run Windows 7, 64-bit on all three of my home machines, and don't feel the need to go to Windows 8 as there isn't all that much difference 'under the covers' between the two.
Bottom line, I would recommend going to Windows 7 or 8 for anyone who uses their machine for on-line activities such as banking, email, etc, even if it means you need to purchase a new laptop/desktop. After all, if your'e current machine is running XP, it likely means it's many years old anyway and likely short on speed and capacity. The good news is that new PC's are running relatively cheap these days as long as you aren't a hard core gamer who needs 6 gb of RAM and a couple of terabytes of hard drive capacity.
IMHO...
Bottom line, I would recommend going to Windows 7 or 8 for anyone who uses their machine for on-line activities such as banking, email, etc, even if it means you need to purchase a new laptop/desktop. After all, if your'e current machine is running XP, it likely means it's many years old anyway and likely short on speed and capacity. The good news is that new PC's are running relatively cheap these days as long as you aren't a hard core gamer who needs 6 gb of RAM and a couple of terabytes of hard drive capacity.
IMHO...
