 | By Mark Joseph Edwards XP users who plan to upgrade directly to Windows 7 will have to completely erase their existing installations to do so. The Windows 7 installer may help you move your XP files and settings, but you’ll still have to reinstall all your applications. |
Mainstream support for XP ends with a whimper
Windows XP is officially an orphan. Two days ago — April 14 — Microsoft stopped supporting XP for free. The exception is certain security patches, which will continue to be released until April 8, 2014, according to a schedule posted on Microsoft’s Help and Support site. Other than those patches, the only way to get any other type of XP fix now is by purchasing extended-support contracts, although they will also expire on April 8, 2014.
XP has been on the market since October 25, 2001, so there aren’t likely to be many new problems that will be fixed in the OS, apart from security holes. If you use XP, of course, you’ll probably want to continue to receive security patches.
For example, a devious person on a LAN can exploit a flaw in XP’s Internet Connection Sharing feature, according to an alert by eEye Digital Security. The firm first reported this in October 2006 and says Microsoft still hasn’t patched it in the intervening years. The problem is rather significant in that an untrustworthy user could disable the Windows Firewall on a host machine, possibly leaving it open to other attacks.
If you plan to migrate your XP system to Windows 7, you may be in for a bit of a shock. You’ll have to do a clean install of Windows 7, because Microsoft won’t offer a direct upgrade path from XP.
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