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Reminder: Move away from Windows XP now

This article from PCWorld should be a reminder to everyone that is still using Windows XP to start planning your upgrade to a newer version of Windows.

Essentially, Windows XP will no longer receive security patches after April 2014. What does this mean?

As the article explains:

“The very first month that Microsoft releases security updates for supported versions of Windows, attackers will reverse engineer those updates, find the vulnerabilities, and test Windows XP to see if it shares those vulnerabilities. If it does, attackers will attempt to develop exploit code that can take advantage of those vulnerabilities on Windows XP. Since a security update will never become available for Windows XP to address these vulnerabilities, Windows XP will essentially have a ‘zero-day’ vulnerability forever.”

Obviously, this is Very Bad.

Luckily, there are more than a few newer versions of Windows you can switch to:

  • Windows Vista
  • Windows 7
  • Windows 8
  • Windows 8.1, which will be released later this fall

Remember, Windows XP was first released 12 years ago! Sure, Microsoft has kept updating it because it remains popular, but the writing is now on the wall. You need to update. Obviously Windows Vista was not widely adopted. And the same can be said for Windows 8. But Windows 7 works great and I’m sure Windows 8.1 will also be quite nice.

It will be interesting how this affects Windows XP market share, which according to this related article at PCWorld, is still around 37%. That’s a lot of people that need to move! And even if Microsoft still decided to patch XP for some of their most important customers, that won’t really help you.

Xojo continues to be able to create apps that are compatible with Windows XP, however like Microsoft we really do not recommend using Windows XP as your development machine.

Update: You might want to give Windows 10 a try!