At the very least it will involve purchasing and installing additional RAM modules for your computer ($40 and up). So that usually means some hardware upgrades as well. Secondly, your current computer might not have the computing horsepower necessary to run Microsoft’s newer operating systems. First of all, there is the cost of purchasing Windows 7 or 8 at somewhere between $80 and $160. Rain’s advice to you is to stay on the Microsoft treadmill by upgrading to Windows 7 or Windows 8. Once they start figuring them out, it’ll pretty much be open season on the now unpatched Windows XP machines. Malware writers will immediately start attempting to reverse engineer these patches examining the software source code to see if they can find the flaws that Microsoft was fixing. The problems with Windows XP will begin sometime after the first set of Windows 7 and 8 patches are released in May. So, on Microsoft’s monthly “ Patch Tuesday,” they patch all versions of Windows simultaneously. In his blog post of August 15, 2013, Tim Rains explains that security flaws that exist in one version of the Microsoft Windows operating system often occur in multiple versions of Windows. Perhaps you might believe Microsoft’s own “ Director of Trusted Computing.”

The longer you keep using it online, the more vulnerable your computer is. Your WinXP box is going to be the target of every malware writer on the planet. The problem is that you’ll be stuck with XP the way it is with all of its security problems. In the U.S., Target’s POS system was broken into and millions of customers’ banking information was compromised. At present, depending on whose statistics you believe, 20 to 30 per cent of the world’s PCs are still running Windows XP.Ī scary thought is that most bank ATM machines and many retail point of sale (POS) systems are running embedded XP. Microsoft’s “Windows XP” operating system, first introduced in August, 2001 reaches its official “end of life” on April 8, 2014.Īfter that, Microsoft will stop issuing patches, bug fixes and updates for this 13-year-old computer operating system.

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