You’ll be forced to upgrade eventually. Without patching support the XP machines aren’t HIPAA compliant. (IT Security standards)
Yeah. We took the bull by the horns and our desperate need to upgrade is opening the door for the rest of the institution...
We are running two applications that are enormous memory hogs, a speech recognition app, and an image manipulation and display app that has to read, display and manipulate huge image sets with little or no delay for the person facing the screen.
We were the vanguard of the purchase of Windows 7 in the institution, and were the first ones allowed to formally get any of them on the network with full IT support, and they have had to begin upgrading hardware, policies and support tools to keep up, so they are positioning themselves to make the move...soon.
Thank goodness. I don’t blame IT, it was a thorny issue. We have also been drivers of getting movement towards gigabit to the desktop, which we really need as well.
Bingo.