It’s 12 years old, but support for (i think one of the best operating systems) Windows XP is ending soon, and time to think about upgrading your operating system.
Windows XP has been a great OS, and is not bloated so it can run on a modest system with only 512M RAM quite comfortably. But come April 8 support from Microsoft will stop.
Will it still work after April 8? Of course it will, but you will not receive any security or system updates from Microsoft. While this does not seem too bad, it is actually much worse than you might think. Whilst Windows 7/8/8.1Vista will continue to receive updates to fix vulnerabilities, this will expose (or rather highlight) where the holes are in XP – and thus more exploits will appear.
If you are running Microsoft Security Essentials as your anti virus product, this will updated post April 8, but according to Microsoft only for a limited time. Note: New installs of Security Essentials on a Windows XP PC will not be possible after April 8. So it is definitely time to do something about it the expiration of support for Windows XP.
And what are your options? Either to upgrade your operating system to Windows 8.1 (which is the latest current version of Windows), or buy a new PC. What you may find is that your hardware and memory are insufficient to run Windows 8. Check out Microsoft’s Windows 8.1 system requirements page to see if you can use Windows 8.1. On that same page is a link for the upgrade assistant piece of software, but unfortunately this only works with Windows 7 or Windows 8.
If you’re not sure what operating system you are actually using now, check out this Microsoft page for a bit of help.
Do you still use Windows XP? Leave a comment below.