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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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Wow! Look!! A stray meatball!! Let's interview it!
(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.