XP: The End Is Near. What are you doing about it? By Bruce Preston As of April 8th, 2014, Microsoft will cease all support of the Windows XP operating system at the SP3 level, having discontinued support for SP2 some time ago. Microsoft is also discontinuing support for Office 2003. This means that there will no longer be 'Critical Updates" published on "Patch Tuesday" (the 2nd Tuesday of each month) and any security vulnerabilities will go unchallenged by the operating system or Office applications. It is likely that the anti-virus vendors will also cease publishing updates for XP in the near future, just as they ceased support/updating for the Windows 9x, Me, and the NT family of enterprise desktop operating systems. Windows XP was released to PC manufacturers in April 2001 and for retail in August 2001; it is thus more than 12 years old. In a press release dated January 15th, 2014, Microsoft says that 30% of operating Windows machines are still running XP. A 2010 study of 22 million Windows computers found that 48% of them were infected by malware. Of these, 1.5 million had software that eavesdropped on financial transactions such as on-line banking. This study was conducted after Microsoft dropped support of Windows XP SP2. It is anticipated that there will be a similar surge of attacks once support for XP SP3 is dropped. What should you do? The answer depends upon how you use your Windows PC. One course of action is to retire the physical computer and replace it with a machine running a current operating system. However this may not be economically feasible. If you have other means of access to the internet you could continue using the XP machine with the Internet disabled. This may be done by changing the internet protocol stack, specifically by changing the DNS server settings from "Obtain automatically" to "Use the following DNS Servers" and only having the IP address of 127.0.0.1 which is also known as "Localhost". With this any request for an internet connection will fail as your XP machine won't have a way to convert a domain name address to an IP address. Note: The machine may still participate in local networking, i.e. file and printer sharing – it just can't see the internet. If you do need internet access and your primary utilization is e-mail, word processing, spreadsheet etc., then the hardware may still be adequate for your needs but you will need a newer operating system. It is unlikely that you will get satisfactory performance if you try putting Windows 7 or 8 or 8.1 on an XP-era machine. The newer operating systems really require more RAM, a faster processor, and often a more capable video subsystem. Fortunately there are many Linux distributions that do not demand higher performance hardware. Perhaps the most popular general purpose Linux distribution is Ubuntu Desktop 12.04 LTS. LTS stands for Long Term Support; it will be supported until 2017. 13.04 has been released and is an interim release, 14.04 will be an LTS release and overlap 12.04's life cycle. From the user's point of view, migrating to the Ubuntu Desktop interface has an easy learning curve and it automatically includes LibreOffice, which is file format compatible with Microsoft Office. The user interface will be familiar to Office 2003 users, it does not have the 'Ribbon' introduced in Office 2007. LibreOffice provides word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and drawing capabilities. There is a huge library of application programs available for other purposes, too numerous to list here. Ubuntu installs the Firefox web browser, and you may do your e-mail either with a browser-based client (i.e. Firefox) or a mail client program such as Thunderbird, which provides much of Outlook's functionality. Linux distributions are free, as is LibreOffice. Most distributions consist of a "Live CD" (usually a DVD rather than a CD.) The "Live" designation means that you may boot from the CD and make use of the full operating system without installing it on your hard disk. Some actions such as booting and loading programs will be slower as the optical drive is slower than a hard drive, but once a program is loaded it should be comparable to running from the hard disk. If you find that you like the Ubuntu environment, then boot from the CD again and select the Install option. The installers do a great job of detecting hardware automatically and attaching the correct drivers. For example, it recognized my eBay no-name $8 USB web camera with microphone, and it recognized and configured a USB 802.11n network adapter. I installed Skype and was operational with video just by clicking "Next" or "OK" several times. Once I gave it my Skype ID and password it loaded my contacts and I was in full operation. Convert Your XP Machine to Ubuntu Workshop On
If you have a notebook computer running XP, bring it and try the run from a provided "Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Live CD". Then if you wish convert it, you may do so while attending the workshop. It is probably impractical to lug a desktop computer, display, keyboard, and mouse to the Resource Center. We can not provide monitors, keyboards or mice. You are still welcome to come and may participate in the workshop as an observer. Important Note: If you are going to do the installation it is highly recommended that before coming to the workshop you burn your data files to CD(s) or DVD(s) and/or save them to either an external hard drive or flash drive. It is important that you do not make use of a Windows software backup package to perform the backup unless you know that there is a corresponding package available for Linux. Saving as ZIP files is acceptable. It is expected that the workshop will last about two hours. While registration is not required, we do ask that you let us know that you are coming so that we may have enough Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Live CDs (DVDs) to distribute.
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