{"id":2937,"date":"2014-03-31T16:17:19","date_gmt":"2014-03-31T23:17:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/?p=2937"},"modified":"2014-03-31T16:17:19","modified_gmt":"2014-03-31T23:17:19","slug":"i-researched-the-xp-alternatives-and-made-my-choice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/2014\/i-researched-the-xp-alternatives-and-made-my-choice\/","title":{"rendered":"I Researched the XP Alternatives and Made My Choice"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

\"Dell<\/p>\n

I own two XP machines: a 9-year-old Dell Dimension 3000<\/a> tower (are they expensive collector’s items yet?) and an almost-8-year-old IBM ThinkPad R51e. I doubt either has the muscle or<\/i> the brains to run Windows 7 or Window 8.1 well (if at all).<\/p>\n

What do I plan to do about their soon-to-be-dangerous-on-the-Internet OS?<\/p>\n

Well, I had thought to switch to Linux<\/strong> 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!<\/i> — eh, where was I? \ud83d\ude44<\/p>\n

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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Well, I’ve decided to just stick with XP after<\/strong> beefing up security even further and maintaining some other safe surfing practices. I’m thinking along these lines:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Go to the bother of logging onto XP as a non-admin user. (HT: TechGuy Labs<\/a>)<\/span><\/li>\n
  2. Continue using Firefox.<\/li>\n
  3. Be very wary about any email links I click.<\/li>\n
  4. Get software only from safe, reputable sources><\/li>\n
  5. Keep on keeping antivirus, antimalware stuff updated<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Why stick with XP? Well, besides the no-dough issue there’s this problem:<\/p>\n

    I will not part ways with WordPerfect 6.
    \nNot the Windows (3.1, I might insert!) version.
    \nNot the MS DOS version.<\/div>\n

    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<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

    Perhaps in another post I will outline the process I followed in prepping my XP machines for the death<\/strong> of Microsoft support. Meanwhile, in other news…<\/p>\n

    \"End<\/p>\n

    I saw most of this on my ThinkPad recently!<\/i><\/p>\n

    If you’re still running an XP machine, what are your plans?<\/p>\n

    (I’ll likely do some experimenting sometime with setting up one of my machines as a dual-boot XP-Linux<\/a> system.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I’m sticking with Windows XP over Linux, MS DOS, and Win3.1!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"I Researched the XP Alternatives and Made My Choice http:\/\/wp.me\/prJUJ-Ln","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[13],"tags":[424,909,697],"class_list":["post-2937","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech-stuff","tag-security","tag-tips","tag-windows"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/prJUJ-Ln","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2937","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2937"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2937\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2937"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2937"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2937"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}