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Yesterday Microsoft ended support for Windows XP. While many users and even businesses continue to cling to the venerable OS there will be no further security updates and even with active anti-virus and malware protection, many users will be left unsecure reports the LA Times and various other news outlets.
There are some exceptions for the right customers.
The UK and Dutch governments have paid Microsoft multiple millions to extend support for Windows XP past the 8 April cutoff date.
The UK extension cost £5.5m but is only valid for a year, after which public-sector users will have to be moved to newer software.
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Microsoft Ends Support for Windows XP
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HELP! Man trapped in a human body!
(Score: 5, Informative) by Hairyfeet on Wednesday April 09 2014, @03:04PM
1.- You CAN run Windows 7 on 384MB of RAM, in fact you can run it on less, you just need the pirate version as yet again the pirate version is better than that put out by the company. Look up "Windows 7 Tiny", in fact look up the entire "Tiny" family and you'll find an OS stripped down for gamers originally that uses just insanely little amounts of RAM while running over 95% of the Windows software out there. TinyXP? 80Mb of RAM wither everything, lose IE,OE and WMP? 50MB. Tiny 2K3? 60MB-130Mb. TinyVista? 384MB-512MB (hey they are hackers, not miracle workers), Tiny 7? 128MB-256MB. So if you really want a stripped down Windows for a VM? Its the way to go, crazy fast. Its just a shame MSFT won't sell Windows Light (for embedded/legacy PCs) to individuals, I'm sure many would buy it for VMs if the price was right.
Oh and if anybody wonders "how low can you go" the answer is the now hard to find Tiny 2K Pro, it ran great on just 32Mb of RAM and flies on anything above 64Mb. Use a light browser like Kmeleon and you have a VM that could run well on an Atom netbook.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Thursday April 10 2014, @05:05AM
Interesting! I'll have to look for those.
Funny Win2K story: For years my rig for testing hard drives was a 486DX4-100 (because it was completely nonfussy and would work with any HD) with a whopping 8mb RAM (cuz that was the minimum to make it go). One day I accidentally attached the wrong HD to it, and found myself watching Win2K booting up... slowly, but once it got there it was perfectly functional, and not even terribly laggy. I was amazed!!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Thursday April 10 2014, @05:52AM
Well I learned about it because I have a few gamer customers and they are AL about squeezing every last FPS they can get and these practically use zero CPU and so little RAM as to not matter. I have put them through their paces on both real hardware and as VMs and...pretty damned impressive, those little gamer hackers really know their stuff, they not only stripped out all the bloat (in fact all versions can be installed from CD instead of needing a DVD) but pretty much any of your everyday software, browsers, media players, chat, they all work just fine. Hell it even beat WinFLP by a pretty good clip and that was designed by MSFT for older systems!
And as for your story I have done something similar, only it was a 300Mhz PII with 64Mb of RAM and WinXP SP2...it ran, slow as Xmas but it did run. I could do basic tasks on it just fine but boy you should have seen how much swapping was going on LOL!
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday April 10 2014, @05:59AM
Want to speed up that low-RAM system? turn the swapfile off entirely. That's probably why my mistakenly-grabbed Win2K wasn't unusably laggy when it found itself in such a minimal situation ... it was already used to doing without. :) (It was a test install I never really used, but didn't wipe either as it wasn't fussy about the hardware it was affixed to.)
Okay, I will definitely have to try those pared-down Windows!! -- Remember BlackViper's "kill needless services" site? Same principle, but after the fact.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1) by meisterister on Thursday April 10 2014, @11:28PM
Anyone mind if I say that Windows 2000 was a pretty good OS?
Too bad microsoft hasn't made a better OS since.
(May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday April 10 2014, @11:42PM
I won't disagree with that. I like XP, but I think they hit a sweet spot with W2K's overall quality and lack of needless junk. It just did its job without being a PITA or a hardware hog.
Today I spent some time working on a Win7 box... some sort of multicore AMD 2GHz with 2GB RAM... it was downright *piggy* compared to this sorry old single-core P4-1.8GHz/1.2GB RAM running XP. I'm reminded why I didn't jump right up and switch. Not to mention I developed an urge to do bodily harm to whoever rearranged W7's system tools. Stuff was much the same once I found it, but *finding* it was an adventure.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday April 17 2014, @01:44AM
Found it, and TinyXP (gotta try these as soon as I have room to mess with extra PCs again) ... TPB to the rescue of old machines!
And thereby discovered there was once Godly XP -- which would run on just 20mb RAM (designed for gaming, but imagine it on an old laptop) -- mentioned on
http://aspireonesoftware.wordpress.com/2008/10/02/ godly-xp-sp3/ [wordpress.com]
but the links are dead and I could not find a copy. :(
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.