Uh, oh. On April 8th, Bob and other XP users will have a decision to make – or not. That’s the day when Microsoft will stop supporting Windows XP. Is this the end of civilization as we know it?
That scream in the distance is Bob crying out “But I like my Windows XP machine!”
According to a recent study by Trustworthy Computing, Windows XP systems have a malware infection rate six times higher than Windows 8. AV-Test, which runs tests on security solutions, says XP will have more holes than Swiss cheese after the general updates stop. However, Microsoft will continue updates to its free security product, Microsoft Security Essentials until July, 2015.
That’s Bob in the distance shouting “But I like Swiss cheese!”
There are going to be a lot of upset people around, because Windows XP is still the choice of 29 percent of all the users and that number is actually rising. Windows 8, introduced by Microsoft almost two years ago, has just seven percent of the market. What’s even worse, the number of XP users actually increased last December.
So why drop support? Well, you don’t make any money supporting old systems. So take that, old-fashioned users.
So what about the security issues? Well we use BullGuard anti-virus (not free) and Malwarebytes, which has a free version. Avast anti-virus is very good and free, and we used it for several years before switching to BullGuard,
So what’s a person to do? Well, as they used to say back on the farm – sucking on a piece of wheat straw for the full effect – it seems to us that with a market as large as nearly one-third of all PC users, it might be a good business for someone to offer continued technical support for a small monthly fee.