Retiring Windows XP and Office 2003

In approximately 220 days, support for Windows XP and Office 2003 will end.   Most Small and Medium business support groups will start phasing out support in October of 2013.   What this means to you,

- Security Risks

- Compliance Risks

- Lack of Independent Software Vendor Support

- Lack of Hardware Vendor Support

Here is even more detail, 

- Retiring Windows XP (Microsoft)

- XP's retirement will be hacker heaven

- Support ends in 2014 for Windows XP and Office 2003 (Microsoft)

If these were big enough issues, the looming issue is 41% of all Windows users still use Windows XP.

I see three possible outcomes to the Windows XP end of support.

- Nothing happens immediately, but over 3 - 6 months software starts to change and is no longer compatible with Windows XP drivers.

- In the months leading up to the retirement date prices for other Operating Systems (Windows 7, Windows 8) increase and you pay more to upgrade.

- Hackers and other folks aware of the end of support date store up viruses, malware, etc. and then set them loose on the unsupported Windows XP user base.   With such a broad installation base this could be a potential nightmare.

What should you do?

In my opinion, upgrade now.  Avoid the risk of lack of support, gain the benefit from improved performance, and mitigate your risk. 

A bad buy at any price

Here are two hard drives that I recently had to recover for a client.   The client had been convinced to buy a used computer with used parts.   Purchased a year ago for approximately $200.00 and about $100.00 in services she showed up at my office with one dead and one failing drive. The only drive that was eventually recoverable had 487556 hours on it, approximately 8 years of constant use.  The other non recoverable drive had an even older manufacture date. I asked if she had know about the age of the hard drives, she indicated that she had no idea.

There is a lot of discussion on the life span and MBTF (Mean Time Between Failure) of hard drives, but if given a choice, I would choose a hard drive with less than almost 8 years of usage on it.

In the end the client paid for a new computer, and my services just less than one year since the purchase of the used computer.   Used computers do not make financial sense, in many cases, such as this one, you do not know what you are buying.