What? That Windows XP is the “second most popular OS in the world, after Windows 7” means only that it was sold for a long time and many people bought many systems during those years. It’s not as if they sell various versions of Windows at the same time and let you choose. (“So, your choices include Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT, Windows XP and Windows 7. Which one would you like on your new computer?”)
People do indeed hate change. When Facebook or Gmail make a change there is a lot of complaints, but people quickly adjust and shut up. When another change is made later down the line, the same chorus starts up again and the cycle begins anew.
It is heading towards 11 months since Windows 8 was first released. I don’t believe the complaints are any less strident then they were in October 2012. This is more then just an aversion to change.
IMHO, the UI interface isn’t just “different”; it is painful to use on a work machine (you know, a laptop or desktop used for more then tweets and porn) counter intuitive and last but not least, just plain ugly.
Well, yes to the first point. But Metro isn’t anywhere near as bad as even Vista, let alone some of the real failures, in that it works exactly as it’s supposed to.
I think it’s too early to tell if it’s actually been a failure. For better or worse, everyone now knows that Windows is an OS that is fully designed for touchscreens as well as desktops. Most consumer devices will be touchscreen soon, if they’re not already (more and more laptops are either touch enabled or full convertible models, that have the screen as a detachable tablet) so they needed to do something. Whether they’ve pissed people off enough that they leave Windows permanently remains to be seen, but I rather doubt it. It would certainly be good to have phone, tablet and PC all running the same OS and being properly synced (and also games console, as the Xbox One basically runs a modified version of Windows).
Microsoft don’t really care about people still running 5 year old computers with no intention of upgrading, as they’re not actually customers. They need to sell new products, and at least in the consumer market, that’s going to involve touchscreens.
It’s our own fault for allowing Microsoft to dominate the windows market.
There used to be several companies selling DOS. Even during Win 95 there were third party desktop managers you could buy.
Now its a Microsoft or Apple world. They pull the puppet strings and laugh all the way to the bank.
As others said. There was very little need for Win 8. Win 7 was only out for a few years. People were still migrating to Win 7 when Win 8 comes out.
Sorry. I chose my words poorly. It would be better and more accurate to say that it is the second most widely used OS.
This doesn’t alter what was said in the preceding paragraph though.
The new laptop I am typing on was purchased three months ago. It is running Windows 8 but I had the option of purchasing a laptop with Windows 7.
The desktop functions the same as previous ones. Assuming you work with the same small set of programs regularly, like most people, you can just pin them to the desktop and/or taskbar and never see the Start screen.
I honestly don’t understand this complaint. What are you doing that is painful?
Windows XP was released in 2001 while Windows Vista was released in 2007, so Windows XP was sold for six years. That’s longer than most Microsoft operating systems are available. Also the early 2000s were when the Internet was experiencing tremendous growth, so many people were buying computers for the first time. And it was basically before smartphones were available. In short, Windows XP’s large sales are partly an accident of timing.
I agree it works as it is supposed to. Which is exactly why I said it was poorly conceived. Vista was not poorly conceived, just poorly implemented. Same with Windows ME.
Agreed, but the signs aren’t encouraging.
Microsoft appear to have ignored that tablets, phones and laptop/desktop have very different functions. Touchscreens on a laptop or desktop still seem gimmicky, especially on the latter. (I can’t imagine anyone working on a touchscreen desktop for upwards of six hours a day.) YMMV.
Except they were customers and at some point they will upgrade and be customers again. Why alienate them? (Yeah, I know, a company that dominates 90% of a market can afford to do so, and its not as if the majority of XP users would switch to Apple or Linux, but still…)
Actually, some people who had Windows desktop or laptop systems are opting to replace them with just a smartphone or tablet. So Microsoft is losing customers.
If you read my earlier posts you will see that I have stated that I have made Windows 8 work comfortably for me. (Starting with post 52, which was in response to a post by you. ) That doesn’t mean I don’t or can’t consider the Metro UI to be a poorly conceived POS on a laptop or desktop.
If you just use a PC for browsing and social media, I can see that happening, and not just on a a very limited scale. Point conceded.
Personally I run third-party firewall and anti-virus and don’t download the patches anyway. I did upgrade some computers to SP3 and I do install a hotfix now and then when the need arises.
Really the XP machines I am in charge of are very clean machines and run just fine. MS ending “support” won’t affect me one way or the other.
There are also people who just happen to disagree with you on this or that version - without subscribing to the love-all or hate-all groups.
I hated Windows ME and steered well clear of Vista. Windows 8, I find to be not anywhere near as bad as I feared or expected, and certainly not bad enough to justify the weeping and wailing I keep hearing about it.
(For the record, I didn’t much like the fat Aero Glass look of Windows Vista/7 - and I do remember some resistance to XP in small corporate settings - because it was a change of technology and a lot of legacy software and hardware didn’t work)
I’ve never understood the Vista hatred. My previous laptop (retired a few months ago due to hardware issues at ca. 6yo) ran fine with it. My current laptop seems to be OK with 8 (OK, so I did buy “Windows 8 for Dummies”, plus had to do some Googling), once I figured out spending most of my life on the Desktop side. 
The biggest problem with Vista was that Microsoft allowed it to be sold with computers that weren’t capable of running it properly. That’s at least in part due to the high system requirements for it, though, higher than 8 as far as I know.
That’s probably one of the worst things Microsoft did, as far as being trustworthy.
I think it was more than that. I knew people running Vista on quad-core machines who had troubles with the OS, and those problems basically disappeared as soon as they upgraded to Windows 7.
OP here. I think a wide ranging discussion is a good thing, given that we are 5 months away from Malwareaggedonarama. But I gently remind my fellow posters that the central topic of this thread is pro-active: what should various different sorts of users do about this? Like others, I have and will veer off from the core topic though.
One thing I haven’t seen discussed is the possibility of MS changing their policy. They might extend the April 8 deadline. They might charge for critical updates at a more reasonable price (though it’s noteworthy that the $200 per year fix is for corporate customers only, and they may be receiving additional service). What they do affects optimal planning.
This post is highly topical:
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Why don’t you download the patches for the computers that you are in charge of? Wouldn’t that make sense, at least after a 2 month test period if not sooner, ie immediately?
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Would others like to opine on this issue? Standard threat management typically involves multiple security barriers. How robust or important are patches on 5-6 year old OS, counting from SP3?
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[hijack]Uninstalling java is prudent, right? [/hijack]
From a 2010 study: anti-viral packages aren’t so hot, even when put up against original version of the initial exploit: Among all ten products, NSS found that the average detection rate against original exploits was 76 percent, and that only three out of ten products stopped all of the original exploits. The average detection against exploits variants was even lower at 58 percent, NSS found.
…Moy notes that while the anti-virus vendors state they are now processing more than 50,000 malware samples every day, it appears the majority of vendors still fail to block the most widely-used methods of delivering those malware samples. I’ve seen other reports consistent with this one. Methodological critiques available via the link.
People who can afford to upgrade their hardware, OS and possibly some of their applications, should. They should upgrade to windows 8 and if they really hate the new bits, they should install Start8 and they’ll be perfectly happy.
Anyone bitching about MS pulling the XP rug from under them now should think very carefully about only jumping to Windows 7, because that will put them in a position where the same thing will happen again sooner than it would if they upgrade to 8.
People who can’t afford to upgrade, and who only use their computers for basic stuff such as Web, email, office should seriously consider switching to Linux - Ubuntu and its variants are now completely easy and user-friendly enough for this to be a serious, sensible proposition - and you can try it for as long as you like with a bootable CD or USB stick before committing.
People who can’t afford to upgrade, and are reliant on specific bits of Windows-only software should upgrade their anti-malware solution to something very robust (I hear good things about NOD32), look at turning off or uninstalling services and components they never use (because this would minimise their exposure profile), hunker down and start saving up for an upgrade as soon as possible. Maybe make a disk image of their computer too - so they can restore back to a known working configuration if it all goes badly wrong (which probably isn’t as likely as I might be making it sound).
It’s remotely possible that they might, but I don’t think they will - they want people to move away from XP
Can’t forget that legendary POS, Windows ME. 
But the fact is, choices exist. My corner of the Federal bureaucracy didn’t have to be running Win XP almost exclusively on its thousands of desktop computers in 2013, but there it is. And even in the individual market, it was possible to get machines with XP well after the introduction of Vista (and apparently even after the introduction of Win 7, a fact I wasn’t aware of before this thread). People didn’t say, “I can’t believe they’re still selling laptops with that XP crap on it,” they were perfectly willing to buy them. XP sold for so long because people were happy with it. It was a very dependable OS, and didn’t have anywhere near the hardware requirements of its successors.
If it had been another Win ME, new computers wouldn’t have been sold with XP as their OS once Vista came along, and by now only 37 people in the world would give a goddamn whether Microsoft kept supporting it or not.