Windows XP support has ended

[jscheuer1]

For details see:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/end-support-help

where they mention that this puts your PC at risk and offers two options to fix that:


How do I stay protected?
To stay protected now that support has ended, you have two options:

Upgrade your current PC

Get a new PC

I think they missed at least one:

Use Opera, Chrome and/or Firefox as your browser(s) and get an anti-virus/anti-malware program not written by MS (like Malwarebytes and/or AVG), which if you're an XP user, are two things you should have done a long time ago.

Oh, but that wouldn't require you to pay MS and/or their licensors any money, so of course that's not mentioned.

[djr33]

My university has implemented a policy where you are not supposed to use an XP computer on the network any more. I'm not exactly sure how they're enforcing this; it might be only for university-owned machines.

Personally I think it would be great to get back to XP rather than whatever nonsense Windows 8 is going for. Maybe the next one can be Windows XP2 and actually be designed with some sense?

[jscheuer1]

In my experience, every other MS OS is seriously flawed. XP was good for its time, whatever they had right before that, was a mess, before that NT was good. After XP Vista sucked, Win 7 is pretty good and if you can run it is a great alternative to XP. I've had no use/need for 8 yet, but just on principle I'm hoping I can hold onto 7 until 9 or whatever's next comes out, which of course would require a new machine.

BTW, the university could enforce their no XP policy by (because the uA string is available with either javascript or PHP) querying the user's OS server and/or client side and kicking off any that come back as XP.

[molendijk]

Use Opera, Chrome and/or Firefox as your browser(s) and get an anti-virus/anti-malware program not written by MS (like Malwarebytes and/or AVG)...
Yes, see also this (http://www.cnet.com/news/new-zero-day-vulnerability-identified-in-all-versions-of-ie/).

[james438]

I still use windows XP SP3. I do hear good things about 7 though.

[traq]

I still have XP (SP3) on my old laptop. I was the last "great" version of windows, IMO. Everyone says 7 is good, but I could not stand being stuck using it for ten years.* Dealing with it on my son's netbook is bad enough. (Yesterday, it said, "could not connect to system event notification service" and just went to a black screen. Four hours wasted on that.) XP might be old, but it is damn stable.

I have 8.1 on my new laptop, but I use it very, very rarely.

* not that I'd be stuck with any version of windows, these days. : )

[djr33]

BTW, the university could enforce their no XP policy by (because the uA string is available with either javascript or PHP) querying the user's OS server and/or client side and kicking off any that come back as XP. They COULD, but that would be really annoying of them. For example, I have an old netbook that still runs XP, and it's possible I'd like to use it on campus at some point. It's my only Windows computer at this point, not that I'm complaining :)

[james438]

traq, what OS would you recommend then? Please don't say mac :p. Linux I can understand as a recommendation.

[traq]

I use Linux, yes. I would recommend Mint or Ubuntu for Linux newbies (they're very similar). The average user will never outgrow them (I still use both and have no complaints). Both hardware and software support are very, very good these days. And, performance-wise, they will run circles around Windows on the same machine.

If you want more "nerd cred" with your Linux, try Arch. Be aware that you have to build/install basically everything, however. Doesn't even ship with a desktop/ window manager. But you can end up with a highly tuned and efficient machine.

[jscheuer1]

Does 'nix do touch? Anyways, I've always sympathized with the view that the dumbed downed bloated OS's like Apple's and Ms'as were not for "real computing", but that's where the majority of it is being done in the real world. As long as I can see with certainty that what I'm writing will work with what most people are using, I will use that OS. I do think that once you're committed to a mainstream end user OS, some Win OS's have definitely been better than others. And it's like anything. It depends upon what you want to do with it and if the machine is set up properly to run it. Not knowing much about those sorts of things I tend to go for memory, processing power and disk space, as well as reliability in a machine, then I try not to run too much at one time on it. Inevitably I do though. I found Win 7 very resilient though, easy to back out of things if they're not working without losing much if any data. I only do some graphics, but when I do it can be pretty intense. The rest of the time I'm running 2 to 5 browsers and sometimes another OS in a VM. I Skype a fair amount and run a Wamp server (intranet only) almost all the time. I can't remember the last time the computer crashed. Occasionally a program will stop responding. Often that's due to code I wrote. Whether it is or not it's easy to kill that program. Only rarely is a reboot needed after that, but I do try to reboot at least once a week, usually with an update that happens anyway.

[traq]

"touch" meaning the filesystem command? yes. meaning "touchscreen"? yes, but drivers for the specific touch device (screen) may/not not be shipped by default with whatever distro you choose.
I have a Wacom tablet that "just works" out-of-the-box.
Installing stuff is not difficult, however. Linux invented the "package manager" concept.

Graphics is one area where you might need Win/Mac (or, at least, WINE (http://www.winehq.org/); which is a windows API compatibility layer). Major players (Photoshop, etc.) don't support Linux. There are alternatives for basic graphics work (Gimp, Inkscape), and things are getting better by leaps and bounds. I do a fair amount of image manipulation, vector art, 3D modeling, and even a bit of video editing using various Linux programs. Of course, if you really need Windows for something-or-other, most computers are powerful enough nowadays to just run Windows in a virtual machine, as needed.

Interoperability is great, however. Linux can manage a wide variety of filesystem formats, and there is software (free, open-source software, even) that can work with the file formats other use. LibreOffice, for example, is pretty much a drop-in replacement for the entire MS Office (extra features too), and can read/write .doc files (in fact, I've recovered corrupted .doc files that Word couldn't open). ffmpeg covers just about anything audio. Even PC gaming support is getting good.

[james438]

It's going to take me a little time to find my way around Ubuntu, but I have it installed. It looks like it is the Operating System (XP SP3) that was causing me to have almost no access to my personal websites. Without getting into too much detail I have thoroughly tested my website and called my ISP and hosting service and reinstalled windows, so I am pretty sure it is XP SP3's fault that I have had almost no access to certain websites (firewalls and virus filters set to off as well).

I'll get Windows 7 next, but I plan on holding onto my XP SP3 installation disc just in case.

As a side note I am having trouble installing Opera onto ubuntu, but there are still countless things I have not tried yet.

[traq]

Are you using the package manager or the terminal?
opera is in the mint repos by default; I'm sure it's available in ubuntu.

Just open a terminal and do sudo apt-get install opera and then enter your password.

[james438]

I tried that and a few other things, but with no luck. Opera is a bit of an odd bird after all. I installed wine and that seemed to do the trick.

It has been fun playing around with Ubuntu this afternoon, but I am in need of sleep. I look forward to continuing to configure ubuntu and learning more about what it can do.

[traq]

I installed wine and that seemed to do the trick.

…really?

There's absolutely no reason you'd need wine. Maybe you downloaded the windows version of opera instead of the linux version? What did apt-get tell you when you tried it?

[james438]

As I recall that everything was fine. My friend who uses linux all the time couldn't understand why it was not working either. I made sure to install the linux version of Opera. Most everything I have seen supports the theory that Opera is just not supported in Linux based systems as of 2013. It is not offered as an approved browser and is not supported. Just to confirm, are you able to get it to work without wine?

[traq]

Yeah, I have it installed for (admittedly, occasional) testing.

I dual-boot for IE; I don't have wine installed at all on this machine.

I am running Mint (not Ubuntu), but, for the most part, they share repos. I'm pretty sure Opera is from an ubuntu repo...