
Microsoft extends updates for Windows XP security products until July 14, 2015 - fraqed
http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2014/01/15/microsoft-extends-updates-windows-xp-security-products-july-14-2015/#!sj2X7
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AdamTReineke
Skip the blog and go right to the source:
[http://blogs.technet.com/b/mmpc/archive/2014/01/15/microsoft...](http://blogs.technet.com/b/mmpc/archive/2014/01/15/microsoft-
antimalware-support-for-windows-xp.aspx)

"To help organizations complete their migrations, Microsoft will continue to
provide updates to our antimalware signatures and engine for Windows XP users
through July 14, 2015.

"This does not affect the end-of-support date of Windows XP, or the
supportability of Windows XP for other Microsoft products, which deliver and
apply those signatures."

~~~
pgrote
From reading the blog post it doesn't look like security updates will be
released. This means you can be infected by any new vulnerabilities, but can
clean it up.

~~~
jlgaddis
Yeah, the key words in the title are "security products": "antimalware engine
and signatures".

------
becauseBloat
...mostly because newer versions of Windows are so absurdly bloated, and just
as slow as a decades old machine on ever more powerful hardware, that there is
almost zero benefit to upgrading beyond XP.

Seriously.

A single core 1.5GHz Pentium 4, with 512MB of RAM, running XP delivers all of
the same features that Windows 7 delivers with a quad-core 3GHz iCore7 and 8GB
or RAM.

Notepad still chokes on 500KB of plain text wrapped to the window, Paint still
struggles with images above 5000 pixels square, MS Office still takes eons to
load, and one large document created by any particularly incompetant user will
destroy 15 minutes of your day. One bad tab in a browser (any browser), and
your entire system might grind to a halt for minutes on end. Starting and
stopping windows services takes ages. Hard drives are still just as noisy as
fuck, and god knows what the fuck is even being paged to disk anymore. Network
traffic is relatively opaque, despite prettied up WYSIWYG spikes on
logarithmic line graphs of monitors that provide meaningless information.

And then Windows 8 comes along and tries to disenfrachise the common layman
end user even further by covering everything up with a touch-based interface
even for machines that have no touchscreen, and follows Ubuntu's lead of
serving up ads in a local file search.

If you want a version of Windows that doesn't embody this nightmare, call
Microsoft directly and provision an Enterprise account with one of their
helpful sales reps. What's the price tag? Why, the sales rep will inform you
of that once you answer some simple questions.

Gee, I wonder why "enterprises" refuse to budge off of XP.

~~~
dubfan
Have you ever tried running a modern browser on a machine with less than 2GB
of RAM? It's not pretty.

~~~
becauseBloat
But that sort of plays into my point.

With a 64 bit version of XP, and 8GB of RAM, you could fit the entirety of the
operating system in memory, paging file and all. A clean install of XP, with
nothing else included, occupies about 3GB of disk space. You'd still have 4GB
of RAM free to run the system.

But as of Vista, the mandatory minimum RAM was escalated (from 64MB) to 1GB,
and all to support a hideous UI, and not much else. The operating system
sprawls across 64GB of disk space.

With every new version, it feels just as shitty as before. Despite umpteen
quadruplings of hardware resources, shit still feels like it's Windows 95,
fucking again. Nothing gets faster. Drop $3,000 a year, just to swim against
the tide, with incremental changes in the appearance of progress bars, so that
ugly animations can actually flash periodically as they steal your youth from
you, rather than inflicting anxiety whilst freezing intermittently.

Every subsequent version of Windows fails to improve, continues to suck, and
in some areas it actually gets worse than it already is. But christ almighty.
After 20 god damned years. Why?

~~~
sliverstorm
Your parent's point is that at least some of the bloat is not actually
Windows. There was a time when Firefox occupied tens of megabytes in RAM.
Today it occupies at _least_ 500MB at all times, for me. So good luck with
your 512MB Windows XP machine of yore- and that one isn't the fault of
Windows.

~~~
becauseBloat
An application installed at the option of the end user is not subject to the
same rigorous requirements that an, oftentimes, compulsory operating system is
subject to.

Especially when the operating system costs money, and lots of it.

~~~
sliverstorm
I still don't see how Firefox bloating proves your point about Windows.

~~~
becauseBloat
Maybe it has something to do with the background service Firefox has to bundle
with their Windows installer now. You know, because Windows registries and
Windows user policies are borderline retarded. But I agree, I'm really not
sure why you decided bring Firefox into this discussion either.

~~~
sliverstorm
dubfan was the one who brought up browsers.

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fotcorn
They will only update antimalware signatures, nothing else.

Direct link:
[http://blogs.technet.com/b/mmpc/archive/2014/01/15/microsoft...](http://blogs.technet.com/b/mmpc/archive/2014/01/15/microsoft-
antimalware-support-for-windows-xp.aspx)

------
beedogs
Ugh. This operating system is almost old enough to vote. Can't they just let
it die?

~~~
ars
> Can't they just let it die?

Why?

If it aint broke don't fix it. What new features do the newer versions of
windows provide that makes it worth spending money, and worse time to upgrade?

I don't use it myself but I know a TON of people on XP and the computer works
fine, they use openoffice, a browser, and a few games.

Computers used to get faster all the time, that's not true anymore. They are
now appliances - you use them till the break, instead of upgrading all the
time.

~~~
stinos
The OS itself might not be broken (though I find 7 way better) but for some
native app developpers like me the continued XP support is not welcome at all,
since it means some of our customers will probably still not upgrade which
means we still have to support them. And that means we cannot use all C++/C#
features we want or have to resort to ugly workarounds. Just compiling C++ for
XP means having to set a flag in Visual Studio, and if you want to do that for
multiple projects automatically you've gotta do it system wide. Thats' not
nice. Worse is .Net 4.5 is simply not supported at all, so no new goodies
which are quite welcome.

~~~
taylodl
That's your fault for choosing Microsoft as your development platform. You've
put them in the driver's seat of your business, which is never a good thing.

~~~
johnduhart
Yeah! Who needs to target 75% of the desktop market!

[http://www.netmarketshare.com/os-market-
share.aspx?qprid=9](http://www.netmarketshare.com/os-market-
share.aspx?qprid=9)

~~~
taylodl
Just because Microsoft dominates the desktop market doesn't mean you have to
use their tool chain when developing for it - this is especially true when
creating commercial applications, not so much for creating business
applications for internal use.

Microsoft often places restrictions on their tool chain for marketing rather
than technical purposes and if you're a commercial software outfit you should
be very wary of using their tool chain for that reason.

------
japaget
I suspect Microsoft is planning to have Windows 9 available by then. I have a
computer that is too old to run Windows 7, and was going to retire it. I'd
rather not deal with Windows 8, and was considering replacing the old computer
with a Mac or with a Linux machine. If Windows 9 is out by the time XP finally
dies, I can stick with Microsoft Windows.

Update: It's just anti-malware signatures, nothing else :-( I really hope the
new Microsoft CEO decides to extend XP support until Windows 9 is out so I
won't have a tough choice come April.

~~~
zanny
I didn't know anyone _liked_ using Windows. Especially when you can get almost
any UX under the sun in linux, assuming any proprietary software you need runs
under wine.

~~~
userbinator
I once spent a rather long time trying to get Linux to work like Windows, but
in the end gave up because it still didn't "feel right" to me.

I think *nix has an awesome CLI, but dismal GUI options, while Windows is just
the opposite.

~~~
kuschku
Have you used KDE? It doesn't look like windows, but it is quite easy to use.

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naaaaak
If I were MS I'd provide no updates to laggards. They either can't upgrade or
they won't upgrade, so what's the point? What does another year of virus
definitions really get them when the Fisher Price OS can already be exploited
in so many other ways?

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sirkneeland
I guess we also just learned the release date for Windows 9...

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sandworm101
Millions of machines about to loose MS support. Millions of machines unable to
run windows 7/8/9\. Millions of people suddenly very interested in linux.

MS isn't worried that people won't upgrade. They are worried that they will.

Also, this may have to do with the Target malware as the afflicted POS
machines appear to be running XP.

~~~
jorts
Not being a troll, but where do you think most of these people are going to
buy these linux boxes? A quick search on bestbuy.com's top deals are all
Windows 8 machines. I think these people are more likely do one of four things
before migrating to linux:

\- Do nothing and use an un-patched machine \- Buy a Windows 8 machine \- Buy
a tablet \- Buy a Mac

~~~
sandworm101
lol, I meant to say that they will be installing linux on the old XP machines,
without buying new hardware. There are plenty of tiny distros that could keep
those XP machines running safely for many years.

~~~
panacea
Fairly sure it's not shitty machines keeping XP alive... it's shitty custom
software that only runs on XP and shitty IT departments.

~~~
vvvVVVvvv
>Shitty IT departments

There you go.

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alien3d
Got a client said ,their oracle form only work on win xp internet explorer 7.
Thanks god for them . But to me it was disaster because to suggest web
application compliance to internet explorer 7 :( Anybody knew about their
activation for windows xp after april 2014. i still got laptop using windows
xp.. 2008 laptop.

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yuhong
It is probably no coincidence this match the date of the end of support of
Server 2003.

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fauigerzigerk
Microsoft should spin off Windows XP (perhaps in combination with IE6) and
sell it to some private equity firm for exploitation. It would live on for
centuries ;-)

------
dzhiurgis
Wasn't able to get Windows XP updates for months now. Not quite sure where the
issue lies, but forums are roaring.

