Don't give in to Microsoft. There are alternatives

juliasdream

If Microsoft has it's way they stands to make millions forcing users of Windows XP to upgrade at a cost of £60 or £70 a go.

I find it very annoying that TV media and press help Microsoft with it's scare tactics without pointing out that there is a free alternative.

Linux's operating system Ubuntu is a viable alternative suitable for the needs of many XP users
My personal recommendation is to download Ubuntu to a memory stick and make it bootable then set up your PC or laptop to dual boot.
You can switch between the two operating systems until your comfortable enough to ditch XP altogether

Go to the download page "How to create a bootable USB stick on Ubuntu" where all is eplained

There are also plenty of alternative open source equivalents to expensive software such as micosoft's Office, Adobe's Photoshop, the list goes on... saving users hundred of pounds.

ballyblack

microsoft's Open Office,

Google's free 'Drive' is just as good for my needs

juliasdream

ballyblack wrote: »

Google's free 'Drive' is just as good for my needs

Thanks for pointing oiut my mistake, now corrected

Uxb

Yes, that is fine for those who are techie minded.
But for the majority of the population who are not, who don't care, who have other things to do in their life, who want computers to "just work".....it really is not a feasible option.

Go onto any Linux forum site and you will find endless posts about how something won't work in Linux, or the motherboards fans always run at full throttle because they cannot be controlled via Linux and so on and so on.

Most people would never have heard of dual boot much less be able to set it up - and they don't care - they have children to sort out, leaking roofs to repair, cars to fix....

Fine if you enjoy doing/learning about Linux, but if you want it to simply work - you buy MS.

Handsome90

Uxb wrote: »

Fine if you enjoy doing/learning about Linux, but if you want it to simply work - you buy MS.

Correction, if you simply want it to work, you buy a Mac Isn't that Apple's moto? It simply works?

Jivesinger

juliasdream wrote: »

If Microsoft has it's way they stands to make millions forcing users of Windows XP to upgrade at a cost of £60 or £70 a go.

I find it very annoying that TV media and press help Microsoft with it's scare tactics without pointing out that there is a free alternative.

I don't understand why people have such a go at Microsoft over this.

They can't support Windows XP for ever, and they announced, years in advance, an end date for support, which they are sticking to. They know lots of people still use XP so they flash up some warnings telling XP users that they will be at increased risk from now onwards. They sold upgrades from XP to Windows 8 for only £25 (which is when I upgraded).

They are basically being quite reasonable...

RumRat

It's not the job of Microsoft to advertise alternatives to their products. Far from scaremongering, they have informed everyone, with plenty of time for them to change to a more secure product, that they would no longer support the past it's sell by date OS.
It is totally beyond me why anyone would want to cling on to something as old as XP anyway, but, now that it's support is finishing, it's madness.

John259

A couple of additional comments:

If like most people you're put off Windows 8 because of Metro, then it can be made far more acceptable by installing one of the free or very low cost utilities such as Classic Shell or StartIsBack. These utilities have options to hide the unwanted Metro aspects of Windows 8, restore the full Start Menu, and generally make it almost identical to Windows 7.

Another possible alternative type of computer for people with relatively simple requirements is a Chromebook. These are low cost laptops which work online, with programs and data files stored remotely and accessed via the Google Chrome web browser. They cannot run Windows programs. They're not without their drawbacks though, so before purchasing make sure you understand exactly what they can do, and more importantly what they cannot do.

Nilrem

MS are giving up XP support after something like 14 years, they effectively stopped selling it about 5 years ago.

As others have said, they have to stop supporting it some time, and they've kept it supported for far longer than most companies would.
XP is dead, it was getting increasingly hard to get it working with modern hardware 8 years ago as it didn't support most of the current "standard" hardware out of the box - even things like drive controllers had to be able to operate in a lower performing mode to support it easily (it was either set the bios to run the drives in an emulated IDE mode, or muck around with trying to install the drivers for the drive controllers via FLOPPY disc to get it to install on a new motherboard ) quite often.
It doesn't support SSD at all by default either, nor even USB2 without additional drivers...

I was glad to dump it once I made the change, Vista (and 7 and 8), install much faster, support modern standards by default, and are much more secure from the moment of install than XP was often after hours of patching.

Handsome90 wrote: »

Correction, if you simply want it to work, you buy an Mac Isn't that Apple's moto? It simply works?

Historically that's largely been because MAC's had very limited hardware combinations (and you generally paid way OTT for non standard gear*), unlike the IBM Compatible Windows machine (which has billions of hardware combinations)
So the chances of driver conflicts/poor drivers causing a crash were very small, as was the amount of software available compared to PC's (and for a long time the market for mac's was small enough virus and malware writers largely ignored it, they could get a better return for the same time/investment by concentrating on windows machines, which led some Mac owners to feel that their machines were much more secure)




*I remember the "good old days" when you could buy a PC videocard for £150, the Apple certified version (same hardware flashed with a different bios, which if you had access to the bios file you could do yourself), was twice that if not more.

bod1467

XP was released for retail sale in October 2001. So it's had a good 12+ years run, with 3 successor operating systems. (4 if you count 8.1 as different to 8).

kwikbreaks

Yes - I don't see MS as the villain of the piece here. Try upgrading a pre-Intel Apple box to the current release of IOS.

Come to that what about Sinclair, Amstrad, Atari, and Commodore - I've seen no updates from them in quite a while either.