MS Office 2003 ok after April 8th?

I have two machines here that run on XP-PRO ... I am not going to do much of anything except watch pretty close where I go online. Everything with the XP machine should work as normal. My two Dell M90 were OFF-LEASE computer and I think I paid $500 each for them. One came still with DELL Warranty still on it. They were both up and running with lots of software still on them. Have been running both of them for over many years now.

Since my M90s are so old now I am going to look for a similar OFF-LEASE eal with ebay stores and see if i can find a good deal for a more current high end DELL workstation to replace the M90. These will be the DELL M6000 series unit. The Dell 6700 is what my old work place got to replace their M90s...

I have one machine dedicated to a radio circuit so I may experiement with upgrading it to WIN7 HOME PREMIUM that I can still pick at local OFFICE DEPOT for aorund $100.

I have two or three very large capacity USB hard drives I use for holding alot of my hobby things like photos etc. I may download a bunch of stuff from my DELL M90s that are XP machines. Probably should download the whole "MY DOCUMENTS section" which is going to be rather large.

My fears like yours is some software will not work on WIN7... I have MS OFFICE 2007 version here on both my DELL M90s.

Hate to see all these go down the tubes but I don't think it is going to be the end of the world for us.

My DELL M90 workstation sits in a Dell Docking station at home all setup with daul monitors, ext keyboard, sounds, etc... All I do is pull the laptop out of the DELL Docking Station and plop it into a Dell Docking station in my RV setup which is setup much the same as the one in the house. Don't see much difference in the operations of the DELL M90. Internet is slower somewhat and have to route my outgoing emails different to send them. Everything else including receiving all my emails is the same when we are on the road.

I use the VERIZON MIFI setup for internet connections.

Just my thoughts
Roy Ken

Short answer is: anything connected to the Internet has security vulnerabilities.

That being said, if you're current on all patches and updates your biggest concern would be some hacker writing NEW malicious code that attacks your flavor of Office/Outlook/Windows. The older the software is, the less chance of new malware being written. JMHO

FWIW, I think some of the antivirus programs will still provide updates that should protect you.

HERE is the answer from Microsoft. We have upgraded to Office 2007 and it transfered all of data from Office 2003.

Extended support of Office 2007 is until October 2017.

You can update to Office 2010

Just update to office 2010 which will be good for another 5 years or so. Office 2010 will open and use all of your office 2003 files so no data lost.

As for XP you can upgrade to Win7 or Win8 depending on your computer configuration to accept those programs or stay on XP. If your using a quality anti-virus program XP will run all of the current major applications for at least couple more years.

I can only answer for myself but I would continue using Office 2003 as long as it did the job for me and not be overly concerned about whether it is vulnerable or not.

It's likely security issues will eventually crop up in unsupported software, such as Office 2003, as it ages. An option would be to isolate it in a sandboxed environment that basically would not allow undetected exploits to effect your system.

A free sandboxed environment called Virtual Kiosk is included in Comodo Firewall, which can be installed while keeping your current AV software. It won't allow the application to make any changes to your OS. It would also isolate files stored on any drives that can only be accessed from within the sandboxed environment. In which case, they wouldn't be available to other desktop applications not run in the sandbox, unless you save them to a special common area called shared space.

Another option would be to download Microsoft's free EMET utility, and add Office 2003 to monitor any suspicious activity typical of malware expliots. Would add an additional layer of security on top of your primary AV software.

I'm still on Office 2000, IMHO the best version. I own 2003 but prefer 2000. I haven't seen any security problems with it in 14 years and am not expecting any n the future.

Use your Office 2003 and don't worry about it. Make sure you are running a firewall and an antivirus on your computer. I have not updated Office since install - no problems, nothing hacked. Office runs, the pc runs.