I work in IT and XP machines are banned from our network. I am aware of many doctors surgeries and schools still running XP with no plans to upgrade anytime soon so we will see if its scaremongering or a real risk.

 

Windows 7 is free for a year by running a line of code every month for 4 months then a bit of a hack. If you want a free year for a little tinkering then look at

 

http://www.oxhow.com/extend-windows-7-trial-period-up-to-one-year/

 

At your own risk but if you can follow instructions then you are good to go.

 

You can see what your old tech does with W7 and then splash the cash after a year for a full licence, but at £ 100 thats 1/3 way towards a newer decent machine.

on a netbook, install Linux! Ubuntu is super simple to use these days, and runs well on a netbook (i have an acer aspire one running which is basically the same laptop) 

 

it is also free, where as windows 7 will cost you the price of a second hand netbook to get......

 

PM me if you need some more info. 

 

Cheers

Daz

 

My last real experience of *nix was many years ago working in IT. I could use it, thought Debian was brilliant server-side, but couldn't see the point on the desktop.

 

I've just put Ubuntu on an XP machine here, and, apart from struggling with the machine's low amount of RAM (512mg), it's a lovely operating system, and you wouldn't even know Linux was under there unless you went looking for it.

Please, no posts mentioning or discussing illegal software or circumventing Windows activation.

 

 

Today will see the last ever patches released for Windows XP, included in these last patches is one last vulnerability patch which is being exploited in the wild already despite only being identified a few weeks ago.

I work in IT and XP machines are banned from our network. I am aware of many doctors surgeries and schools still running XP with no plans to upgrade anytime soon so we will see if its scaremongering or a real risk.

I'm in the process of eliminating the last few XP machines - they haven't been used as people's normal PCs for quite a while but we do have a couple that are just there to drive large screens. They are behind firewalls and never go online so no urgent panic.

I work in IT and XP machines are banned from our network. I am aware of many doctors surgeries and schools still running XP with no plans to upgrade anytime soon so we will see if its scaremongering or a real risk.

 

 

So are Police Scotland, teh NHS and most local authorities although they will for the most part be desperately trying to get rid of those installs. A lot of the problems come down to old application systems that vendors haven;t kept up with. Fecking CAPITA and Northgate being particular culprits.

Microsoft Service Essentials support also finishes today for XP.

I'll still be running the works machine until the new one arrives, but any personal info/passwords in browsers etc I'm binning off before it gets let loose on the Internet again.

Parents have a basic xp laptop which is 6 years old for which I need to find a cheap replacement

Define "cheap",

I'd say £300 or less.

Just needs the ability to surf but with a 14-15" screen.

Ubuntu 14.04 is due out within the next week or two - will be interesting to see how well it works on an older pc.

Sent from my GT-P5110 using Tapatalk

If I can get  Win7 working on a 14 y/o PC, it should be no problem with a 6 y/o laptop, its got to be cheaper than buying another laptop.

Work here are still running a number of XP machines - not sure if they are covered in the government extended support scheme or not. Compounding the issue of XP is the browser is set to IE 8 (latest version on XP IIRC).

 

It is not that XP is inherently bad but if patches are being written for other flavours of Windows, all someone has to do is reverse engineer them to discover the vulnerability. Given that a large part of the OS in Vista, 7 and 8 is still based on Win XP code, a lot of the vulnerabilities discovered in these variations will apply to XP.

 

Still not my problem - we work on the machines we are provided with so if they get hacked, its their problem.

Didn't know there was a thread alrady running on this, soz.

 

Logged off at 10:30 this morning and I got the old  occasional message from Windows, wanting to load the 'latest updates', and "the computer will turn itself off when completed".

There was the facility to click on "not now", so i clicked on that.

 

What's going on here, as I thought all this finished yesterday?

Would I have ended up downloading a virus if I'd let it do its own thing, or am I being paranoid? :think:

It'll be updates you haven't downloaded yet.


There won't be any more new ones.

Yesterday MS released the last ever updates for XP, so last night or this morning you would have downloaded and installed those. There are no more from today going forwards.

Oh. Thanks for that.

Strange, as it took me over half an hour to actually get on the internet this evening, strangely enough AFTER I succumbed to the temptation of loading the updates. :think:

Not sure if M$ mucked up, but I downloaded and installed the final updates yesterday, then found EXACTLY the same set of updates being downloaded and prepared for install again this afternoon.

Not sure if M$ mucked up, but I downloaded and installed the final updates yesterday, then found EXACTLY the same set of updates being downloaded and prepared for install again this afternoon.

So that's it then?

 

Let the hacking begin.