anyweb Posted April 8, 2014 Report post Posted April 8, 2014 Today (April 8th, 2014) marks the End of Life (EOL) of Windows XP, one of the most popular operating systems from Microsoft, however many people are probably still unaware of the fact (and there are probably many who simply don't care). The operating system was released to manufacturing (RTM) on August 24, 2001, and generally released for retail sale on October 25, 2001. XP grew in popularity because it was easy to use and worked on most hardware. I bet most of you have a cousin or friend that is still running Windows XP on a computer at home, today. However, all was not roses with Windows XP, it gained notoriety by being labelled as insecure due to the many worms targeting the unpatched OS and gave Microsoft a bad reputation, so much so that Bill Gates told his employees to get serious about security. In August 2003 the Blaster worm exploited a vulnerability present in every unpatched installation of Windows XP, and was capable of compromising a system even without user action. In May 2004 the Sasser worm spread by using a buffer overflow in a remote service present on every installation. I was onsite with a customer when they got infected and the result was spectacular, systems beeping and rebooting left right and center. You've probably dealt with an infected or insecure XP desktop at one stage or another, and it's quite likely that Internet Explorer looked something like the screenshot below. Securing XP however was possible with some work but it's not that straightforward or easy and for that reason many people just couldn't be bothered. However, Bills memo made a dent in Windows as we know it, as security within Windows XP and especially later operating systems (Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8) from Microsoft improved in leaps and bounds. Today however, is an important day as Microsoft will no longer provide security updates for Windows XP. The message is clear, you'll have heard it over and over, to move away from XP to a supported operating system such as Windows 7 or Windows 8.x, and there are many migrations tools available to help you with that such as this one from windows-noob.com. Microsoft themselves have of course provided many useful courses including this one Migrating from Windows XP to Windows 8.1 and an interactive Windows XP to Windows 8 Migration Guide. Note: Existing Windows XP security updates, service packs, etc. will still be available for download after today (April 8th) however you won’t see any new updates for Windows XP on any subsequent patch Tuesday. I do have a feeling however that the message below (recurring every 8th of the month) will be seen by many people over the coming ....dare I say it... days, months, years... But still, I guess we'll miss it, XP, in all it's glory, it was a nice operating system wasn't it ? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
