Posted on 04/23/2012 4:12:22 PM PDT by Nachum
Microsoft has kicked off what it calls a "two-year countdown" to the death of Windows XP and the Office 2003 productivity suite.
Separately, Microsoft announced that Windows Vista, the problem-plagued operating system that never really took hold among customers, exited mainstream support on April 10. In a product's extended support phase, Microsoft provides security patches to registered users but offers other fixes, including reliability and stability updates, only to organizations that have support contracts with the company.
Windows XP and Office 2003 will no longer be supported as of April 8, 2014, a company spokeswoman said in a recent blog post. On that date, Microsoft will stop shipping security updates for both products.
At that point, XP will have become Microsoft's longest-lived operating system. The company will have maintained the software for 12 years and five months -- or about two and a half years longer than it usually supports an OS. It supported the previous record-holder, Windows NT, for 11 years and five months.
Both XP and Office 2003 have been hugely successful. XP went on sale in October 2001, and Office 2003 launched in October 2003. "Windows XP and Office 2003 were great software releases, but the technology environment has shifted," said Stella Chernyak, a Microsoft marketing director.
(Excerpt) Read more at pcworld.com ...
The main pillar of M$ computing here.
“Ruh Roh” is right.
All the computers at my work have XP as our OS. If Vista (a pox be upon it) isn’t available, we’re going to have to go with Win7. Our IT guy may have some work ahead of him.
,,, personally I like XP better than the Windows 7 system . Paint and MS Word and Photos were much better on XP .
Seems like even though XP was/is more vulnerable to hackers, it is also easier to fix, mainly by replacing corrupted files. WIth 7, they assume the files are perfect and special and blessed and they'll be damned if they let you replace/repair any of them. Hackers don't seem to have that limitation.
The problem with MS support begins with when you try to find the support area for the product you want.
Mostly you will find yourself shuffled off to the forums which are almost as useless as the Google Gmail forums.
If you truly want free support from some volunteer folks with the right answers most of the time, go to www.techguy.org.
You’ll never go to Microsoft support again.
On vista right now...I’ve never had a single problem with it.
Windows XP is the Chevy smallblock V8 of operating systems.
Win7 security bites a lot of users, and I'm not convinced it really improves security against malware enough to be worth the hassle.
Meh, moving to Mac anyway.
Whutevuh. I still Office 2003 because I don’t care for the interface on the new Office products.
1-8-4-3-6-5-7-2!
And because it doesn’t correct grammatical errors...
‘Change we can’t believe in’....... oh well nothing lasts forever and computer OS’s have short shelf lives. Maybe I’ll buy a Mac instead just to register my own personal eff U with Microsoft.
“Paint and MS Word and Photos were much better on XP.”
Hmmm, suspicion confirmed. I have Office 2010 courtesy of a program at work which lets us install it on our home PCs. The Microsoft Picture Manager Auto Correct of the O-2010 version is no where near as good as the one in the 2003 version. As for the graphic rendering of the OS’s GUI W7 w/ Aero is far better than XP imo.
I’m a W7 64-bit user and love it. The benefits of a 64-bit OS, board and CPU with DDR3 and USB-3 makes file access and transfers 4x - 8x the speed of my previous 32-bit XP on the same hardware. And my W7 is actually more stable than XP was.
October of this year seems to be the date of release of WINDOWS 8. At least that is the date most talked about. I’ll miss XP. Been a real good for my needs. Home ed. only.
Yep, I've had with Microsoft. My son uses Apple exclusively and he has worked both systems. When my Vista breaks down and my wife's XP support stops I am through with Microsoft systems. There is a reason why Apple is so popular - the young computer savvy crowd know what works best.
That’s a damned good analogy.
bkmk
I’m still using Office 97.
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