AmIRunningXP.com

[Zaune]

Yes, really.

The terrifying thing is, I know people who actually have to ask...

[Simon_Jester]

So, being ignorant I am curious: what do we expect to happen when support for XP ceases?

[Mr Bean]

So, being ignorant I am curious: what do we expect to happen when support for XP ceases?

There are two schools of thought on the subject. They are called gradual decline and your fucked.

Gradual decline says
Over the days and weeks more and more exploits will be found and used by hackers, scammers and crackers eventually a year from now any computer running windows XP won't be able to connect it to the internet without it getting infected by something.

Your fucked says
Hackers and virus writers have been stockpiling xp exploits for over a year now. Holding onto them until after the April cut off date so they can unleashed them in a storm of hacks and infections. That any computer after the April cut off date will be scanned, botted and infected within hours of connecting to the internet.

The worst fear is something like the restart exploit from a few years back. Where if you had a windows 2000 or windows xp computer an exploit was used to remote restart your computer. Programs were written to scan ip ranges and issue the restart command using the exploit. If the program found a computer that acknowledged back it would save the ip and resend restart orders every five minutes. Two full days where anyone without a firewall had massive issues just using their computer. Worst case it is an exploit like that where remote shutdown or worse drive wipes are allowed.

[White Haven]

There's a third case as well that falls fairly close to the 'you are so absolutely fucked' case without requiring stockpiling. Going forwards, whenever updates come out for, say Vista, or Vista and 7, or whatever, intrepid black-hats can look at what they fix, ask themselves 'does this security hole exist in XP as well?' and if the answer is yes...

Well, then Microsoft just handed out an XP exploit by fixing that same exploit in newer operating systems.

Ultimately, what I've been telling customers is to use XP if you absolutely must (commercial applications without (feasible) updates, etcetera), but keep those systems off the internet as much as is humanly possible. And for the love of all that is shiny, don't surf the web on them.

[phongn]

Every Windows XP user on the planet is fucked one way or another. XP predates most of Microsoft's efforts to seriously harden Windows, efforts that took major revisions to the operating system. Corporate users should've seen this coming for years (and now some large ones are paying vast sums to Microsoft to get support for another year); home users are screwed. Their machines will be compromised (if they aren't already).

[Purple]

I think you are overplaying the issues by a massive degree. It's not like MS is going to release a mandatory download that shuts down your firewall and everything. And I know plenty of people (and business) who have and still use their XP as it came in the box, that is to say without ever downloading a single software update, even the major service packs. In theory they should be massively screwed. But they ain't. Commercially available antivirus software is keeping them secure enough. And with the massive migration toward newer windows systems hackers will be busy trying to find exploits for these new systems.

Real problems won't start until such a point where developers of AV and other protective software decide to discontinue updates for XP users.

[TheFeniX]

At some point in time, people are going to have to upgrade off a 13 year old operating system and/or not expect MS to keep supporting software that old. Even skipping Vista, Windows 7 is 5 years old. If you actually have a computer that came from the factory with XP, that shit is ancient as even with rollbacks, Vista was being pushed hard by PC manufacturers since 2006.

Keeping XP machines for using outdated software with XP compatibility mode shouldn't be anywhere near the Internet anyways. This is like browsing the Internet from a Server: stop it.

And as Purple stated: we're long past the days where every shitty Internet provider was selling everyone DLS "modems" with direct Internet connections. These were the days when even updated XP machines were getting wrecked just by being online with no firewall enabled. Now a SPI firewall/router combo is less than $100 and most Internet providers give you one as a matter of course. There are numerous free and paid software firewalls/IDS/virus/malware scanners that aren't bloatware. Sure, XP is more vulnerable to infected webpages, but maybe people should avoid shady porn sites and quit clicking every link on every piece of spam in their inbox. You can't fix stupid, even with a modern operating system.

[Crazy_Vasey]

Computers were being sold with XP right up to the release of Windows 7. Vista just didn't fit on Netbooks and other cheap, low spec machines.

[Purple]

At some point in time, people are going to have to upgrade off a 13 year old operating system and/or not expect MS to keep supporting software that old. Even skipping Vista, Windows 7 is 5 years old. If you actually have a computer that came from the factory with XP, that shit is ancient as even with rollbacks, Vista was being pushed hard by PC manufacturers since 2006.

That's only true if you tend to buy and swap PC's as a whole item rather than assembling them from parts. Which is not really what most people or enterprises do. You usually only swap the parts that break or need updating one at a time over time. And if you do that, you can end up with a PC that came with XP and still has some parts (like say the primary hard drive you keep the OS on) original but is mostly up to date otherwise. Hell even my machine which is rather up to date still has one hard drive from the 2000's and the original keyboard and case from 1997.

Keeping XP machines for using outdated software with XP compatibility mode shouldn't be anywhere near the Internet anyways. This is like browsing the Internet from a Server: stop it.

Really just don't compare the two. The first is sort of unsafe if you are as you nicely pointed out an idiot. The later should be considered a crime against humanity.

[Zaune]

Computers were being sold with XP right up to the release of Windows 7. Vista just didn't fit on Netbooks and other cheap, low spec machines.

Didn't fit on some quite high spec stuff either; from what I remember reading in Computer Shopper at the time it was a massive rush-job because they needed something 64-bit for home users and "Longhorn" was stuck in alpha testing. Optimisation and other testing was somewhat limited even by Microsoft's standards. And that's without getting into the cool-looking but resource-intensive and ultimately kind of pointless cosmetic stuff like that widget that let you view all your active programs in some sort of animated carousel, which I can only take as evidence that the marketing people are better at office politics than the coders.

[Executor32]

You know most of that 'cool-looking but resource-intensive and ultimately kind of pointless cosmetic stuff' is still in 7, right? Try pressing Win+Tab sometime.

Speaking of pointless resource-intensive cosmetic stuff, remember the Vista Ultimate feature that let you set a video as your desktop background?

[Zaune]

No, I didn't know that. I only ever boot into 7 to play the few games I care about that aren't multi-platform.

[aerius]

So, being ignorant I am curious: what do we expect to happen when support for XP ceases?

Same thing that happened when support for Win 98 stopped. Pretty much nothing unless you're running the computer naked to the world. With basic security precautions it'll be just fine, hell, your smart TV has a better chance of being hacked into and subverted for a botnet than an XP computer.

[Crazy_Vasey]

Computers were being sold with XP right up to the release of Windows 7. Vista just didn't fit on Netbooks and other cheap, low spec machines.

Didn't fit on some quite high spec stuff either; from what I remember reading in Computer Shopper at the time it was a massive rush-job because they needed something 64-bit for home users and "Longhorn" was stuck in alpha testing. Optimisation and other testing was somewhat limited even by Microsoft's standards. And that's without getting into the cool-looking but resource-intensive and ultimately kind of pointless cosmetic stuff like that widget that let you view all your active programs in some sort of animated carousel, which I can only take as evidence that the marketing people are better at office politics than the coders.

Yeah, Vista was genuinely awful on release. It was bloated as all hell, clunky to use[1], and not particularly reliable largely thanks to immature drivers being coupled with fairly sweeping changes to the OS that needed time to bed in. I'm told that the service packs and subsequent patches eventually fixed most of that and left behind a solid, usable system, but I didn't stick around long enough to see for myself; I switched over to use Linux until Windows 7 appeared.

[1] I was especially fond of the the way you'd get asked if you wanted to do something and then asked if you really wanted to do something. Writing to a folder that required admin access got you a normal 'are you sure you want to do this' sort of dialogue followed by the UAC prompt (which took buggering ages to fade in for some reason). Or maybe it the was the other way around. Either way, it was terrifically annoying.

[TheHammer]

Patched and service packed Vista does indeed run pretty well in my experience. But then again, I never had any issues with Windows ME either (still the fastest booting GUI operating system I've ever seen).

[Edi]

A fully patched Vista runs fairly well, but still sucks compared to Win7. It's so much more unfriendly to the user with the constant UAC prompts and if you ever want to actually do anything, it's right-click, run as admin. Such as checking for updates to programs if you intend to install the updates it offers.

As for Windows ME, I never had a single positive thing to say about it. Piece of of unstable shit from start to finish. Puppy Linux works a lot better for the same sort of tasks and boots up even faster if fully installed to hard disk.

[General Zod]

Patched and service packed Vista does indeed run pretty well in my experience. But then again, I never had any issues with Windows ME either (still the fastest booting GUI operating system I've ever seen).

Maybe your hardware just sucked? With the right tweaks and a solid state drive you can get a nearly instant boot-time on a modern OS.

[Batman]

1TB SSD? 450€. 4TB SATA? <150€. Until that ratio changes I think I can live with my OS needing another minute to wake up.

[Covenant]

I'm stuck running with XP for a while longer because I cannot afford a legitimate upgrade and my work machine has to be a powerful enough thing to do some fairly major graphical work. I know there are Windows 7 boxes I can probably get for around 100 bucks or so, but it still feels like a major downgrade to go from a set up machine that's continued to perform to some refurbished thing. I'm sure there will be plenty of other people who give it a go without an upgrade, so either it will be Armageddon or nothing unusual will happen.

7 is the only thing I'd upgrade to though. I need a workstation OS that runs all the things I need, which a MacOS does not and a third party Linux-type machine also would not. Going to Vista is just not going to happen, and the modern 8 is just garbage for what I need. I long for the announcement of a being-developed Windows 9 flavor designed for workstations and power users. I really would like to upgrade, I just don't want to lose all my grotesquely expensive software to an upgrade that doesn't feel like an upgrade.

I'm considering making a purchase of a side-box anyway, and having that be the internet one, but that still sucks. It will take me forever to get things done if I need to constantly be swapping between two machines in order to deliver assets.

[Dominus Atheos]

Why can't you just upgrade the OS on your current machine to windows 7? It's only a hundred dollars.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6832116986

[Zaune]

And it comes in a 32-bit edition as well if that's the obstacle.

[TheFeniX]

That's only true if you tend to buy and swap PC's as a whole item rather than assembling them from parts. Which is not really what most people or enterprises do. You usually only swap the parts that break or need updating one at a time over time. And if you do that, you can end up with a PC that came with XP and still has some parts (like say the primary hard drive you keep the OS on) original but is mostly up to date otherwise. Hell even my machine which is rather up to date still has one hard drive from the 2000's and the original keyboard and case from 1997.

All that assumes you have an IT department capable of recoginizing what parts are bad and replacing them or you have a contract IT group (like what I was) to do the job for you. If you have an IT department and your XP machines getting hacked is going to be a problem for you: you need a new IT department because they suck.

One of the biggest issues with XP was that everyone constantly logged in as the administrator, which no one should be doing as a network users at all, and the home user couldn't get used to the "run as" selection. The same was even worse for ME and those Windows OSs before it: there was no security worth mentioning on the default operating system and group policy barely worked on them at all, merely creating a thin wall of "you can't do that, unless you know what a command prompt is or type file folder names into IE." And many ISPs both small and large were giving users a DSL modem that popped them directly on the Internet with a public IP address (great for guys like me, for my grandmother, not so much). It was a recipe for disaster because the average person was just not prepared for the Internet.

For the rest of the world filled with small-business owners and home users without a son/daughter/nephew/whatever to handle their computer problems: boxed systems are their only go to. Yes, they may be running woefully outdated computers, but like I said: if they have Internet they are more than likely behind an SPI router on their end and many small and large ISPs switched over to packet monitoring years ago because bandwidth costs money and they don't like supporting botnets.

And if you could keep people from clicking whatever links they come across because it might make women want their junk, I'd have been out of a job years before I quit IT. The best OS in the world can't fix stupid.

There's going to be issues when XP support drops, but it's not going to be the endtime like techsites are foretelling solely to garner shitloads of website hits.

[Purple]

All that assumes you have an IT department capable of recoginizing what parts are bad and replacing them or you have a contract IT group (like what I was) to do the job for you. If you have an IT department and your XP machines getting hacked is going to be a problem for you: you need a new IT department because they suck.

There is usually that one guy in every IT department that happens to be in love with hardware. I've got a few friends who are like that. So if all else fails I'll have someone to call on for a few favors.

And many ISPs both small and large were giving users a DSL modem that popped them directly on the Internet with a public IP address (great for guys like me, for my grandmother, not so much). It was a recipe for disaster because the average person was just not prepared for the Internet.

Just out of curiosity does anyone actually still use those? Also, do you ever miss the sound of a telephone modem dialing?

And if you could keep people from clicking whatever links they come across because it might make women want their junk, I'd have been out of a job years before I quit IT. The best OS in the world can't fix stupid.

I get where you are coming from. I guess my disagreement is mostly based on the fact that I am a programing student about to graduate any year now and thus have far more knowledge of these things than the average user which can lead to me underestimating the overall stupidity they exhibit. Basically what I was saying is that for the smart user XP will remain safe for years to come. Where as you were saying that most users ain't smart.

*sigh* It's ironic though that if they weren't so stupid they'd put us software guys out of our jobs.

[Covenant]

Why can't you just upgrade the OS on your current machine to windows 7? It's only a hundred dollars.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6832116986

I'm running versions of Software that don't upgrade well. It's also very expensive stuff too, so I'm hesitant to upgrade and potentially destabilize my system. But the more I read the more I like the idea of a 7 (or even OS of the Professional version, because I do need a Professional OS to do some of my work well.

This is also why I don't jump to Linux or something. I would have no issue if it wasn't for the fact that my work machine (and I work from home) has to be able to run high-end video editing, 3d animation, art and illustration, etc software. It's a full graphics workstation and getting that to work on a modern computer is a piece of cake---but an expensive one.

I may be able to upgrade my system seamlessly to Win7 but I'm not positive. The idea of being out of productivity for a while is gruesome.

In any case, that's why I'm considering a Win7 box to use as my digital client and then using my XP machine as a workstation unconnected from the internet or wireless. Then I can be certain that nothing is getting from the XP machine to the Win7 machine, and so long as I'm only moving my files back and forth through a non-shared medium it should be a near impregnable moat.

But it sounds like a huge hassle, and would be a lot easier if I had both side-by-side and can transition them slowly. I just cannot afford to invest in a graphics machine of the modern era right now. If I can find some for a few hundred bucks I could maybe call it a business expense and get the company to buy it, but it's just one of those things that is far from certain, and with my finances tight right now (had to give up one day job to be out here with my fiancee, and the other is between projects--thus my urgency to get our current thing to deployable status and put us back in black) I'm not willing to risk it.

I obviously have no interest in joining a botnet, and I'm careful about my usage. I've only gotten one virus in my computing career due to my paranoia. So I'm not terribly concerned, but I do want to have an escape plan, you know?

That's why I still wish there was a Workstation OS that I could really see as a major performance upgrade. I tried my best to get my fiancee's 8.1 laptop to run clean but it still takes forever to do stuff that on mine is a simple procedure. Win7 looks better but I really want to invest in a future-perfect option, you know?

Anyway, it's an annoyance. I think I could port my Adobe Creative Suite licences over to a new machine, but I have no idea how everything else would successfully transition.

[TheFeniX]

Just out of curiosity does anyone actually still use those?

Some ISPs probably still do, but likely back it up by having their own bulkhead style setup in their intranet. Think of how AOL is setup. It's been years so don't take my word for it, but the general consensus is that a single computer/workstation having a public address (when it doesn't need it) is a terrible idea, even if they have a firewall enabled. Shit, even servers weren't popped on the Internet when I did IT: they sat inside relatively safer DMZs.

Yes, sufficiently skilled hackers can PAT/NAT scan and probably still get to said computer, but that takes WAY more time than scanning whole blocks of IP address at a time.

But it makes sense why handing out DSL bridges was so popular in the day: It was cheap and ISPs both large and small are run by morons.

Also, do you ever miss the sound of a telephone modem dialing?

Ha, no. I grew up in an area so remote, my max connection speed was around 32kps + compression, which was because the assholes who owned the copper decided to hash out the lines to double their pulls as a cost saving measure.

I get where you are coming from. I guess my disagreement is mostly based on the fact that I am a programing student about to graduate any year now and thus have far more knowledge of these things than the average user which can lead to me underestimating the overall stupidity they exhibit. Basically what I was saying is that for the smart user XP will remain safe for years to come. Where as you were saying that most users ain't smart.

Do you know a single person who users a computer who doesn't at least have an general idea on what a "firewall" is? I spent a lot of time explaining not only what they are, but why they were needed when I worked IT from 2000-2006. However, later on in my career I had to explain it less and less. "Firewall" is now a commonly known term due to no small part of Microsoft bungling the XP launch.

*sigh* It's ironic though that if they weren't so stupid they'd put us software guys out of our jobs.

I'm not a programmer. I have and always will be a hardware guy.