A week from tomorrow Microsoft ends support for Windows XP. You know that. Some of the warnings I’ve read remind me of the good old pre-Y2K hysteria.
I own two XP machines: a 9-year-old Dell Dimension 3000 tower (are they expensive collector’s items yet?) and an almost-8-year-old IBM ThinkPad R51e. I doubt either has the muscle or the brains to run Windows 7 or Window 8.1 well (if at all).
What do I plan to do about their soon-to-be-dangerous-on-the-Internet OS?
Well, I had thought to switch to Linux since I can’t afford to replace either machine with — Wow! I just looked out the window and you ought to see the sunrise-struck clouds against the light-blue sky, all pink and salmon and some-shade-of-orange! — eh, where was I? 🙄
Anyway, so I’d thought to switch to Linux — mint or puppy or loveunto, I didn’t know which. That was after deciding against upgrading to Windows 7.
Well, I’ve decided to just stick with XP after beefing up security even further and maintaining some other safe surfing practices. I’m thinking along these lines:
- Go to the bother of logging onto XP as a non-admin user. (HT: TechGuy Labs)
- Continue using Firefox.
- Be very wary about any email links I click.
- Get software only from safe, reputable sources>
- Keep on keeping antivirus, antimalware stuff updated
Why stick with XP? Well, besides the no-dough issue there’s this problem:
Not the Windows (3.1, I might insert!) version.
Not the MS DOS version.
And since neither will run on Linux (according to my finitely finite understanding of Linux and his distros), my fledgling infatuationary twinges for Linux died.
Perhaps in another post I will outline the process I followed in prepping my XP machines for the death of Microsoft support. Meanwhile, in other news…
I saw most of this on my ThinkPad recently!
If you’re still running an XP machine, what are your plans?
(I’ll likely do some experimenting sometime with setting up one of my machines as a dual-boot XP-Linux system.)
Decided the same. Created new administrator account with password and changed both wife and I to “limited” users. We use Firefox anyway. Have good security system and am wary of emails from unknowns. Will do access to bank and other accounts that require password access on newer laptop that has Windows 7.