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Author Topic: Windows XP & Office 2003 support discontinued  (Read 4797 times)

krysia

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Windows XP & Office 2003 support discontinued
« on: November 09, 2013, 09:45:01 AM »

saw the below and thought it may interest...be useful info for some !



Windows XP & Office 2003 are to become end of life on 8th April 2014.

The software giant is going to automatically switch on Windows Defender for those people who don’t run any system protection on their old XP computers. Microsoft’s official website said that their goal has been focused on getting as many of its users off of the older Windows XP OS onto something more modern and protected – preferably, Windows 8.1.

At the same time, the company decided to discontinue support for Windows XP next April, which means that if users continue to run the operating system any holes will remain, unpatched, forever.

The idea is that as the users go into an unprotected state, the company requires antivirus vendors to be installed as the initial upgrade source. In case the license has expired, the first thing the operating system asks them to do is to upgrade. If the users have no anti-virus software, then the company will automatically install its Defender product. Microsoft said it wouldn’t nag, while telling people that they aren’t protected, and move them back into a protected mode without users really knowing.

At the moment, Windows XP makes up 22% of the worldwide user base, while in developing countries the figure may be close to 1/3 of computers. This means that there could be plenty of machines suddenly protected by Windows Defender very soon.


edited by admin
Amended topic title
« Last Edit: November 09, 2013, 05:23:27 PM by kitz »
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kitz

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Re: Windows XP & Office 2003 support discontinued
« Reply #1 on: November 09, 2013, 05:30:26 PM »

Thanks krysia.

Before I saw the 22% figure, I thought to myself theres still an awful lot of XP machines still out there. 
Particularly when so many rolled back to XP in preference over Vista (me being one of them).

XP was a really nice stable system..  and I know it was originally brought out in 2001, but the fact that 22% still use it, shows just how successful it was. 

The cynical side of me wonders if M$ is now discontinuing support in a push for people to upgrade.   D'oh of course that will be the reason.    ;)
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c6em

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Re: Windows XP & Office 2003 support discontinued
« Reply #2 on: November 09, 2013, 06:05:42 PM »

Continual patching of XP critical issues post April 2014 is going to be available from MS - at a very considerable cost.
I suspect there will be banks/financial groups who will be paying..........a few £000 per workstation (or ATM running XP!) per year methinks.

What would be interesting is if some humdinger of a XP-hole was found/exploited in 2014 such that a very large number of XP machines were affected and this was having a significant effect worldwide - MS would be under huge pressure to produce a "fix" for the public particularly if those who were paying for continual support already had received the fix themselves and it was available.

I'm half wondering if MS is not going to be forced into something like this anyway - critical issues only patched for an additional few years with some warning flagging up on users PC's about this when they are downloaded.

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