It's So Hard to Say Goodbye (to Windows XP)

Windows XP provided us with some great memories, didn't it? Perhaps more importantly, it helped us through the Vista era, which really wasn't as bad as some make it out to be, but did get off to a rocky start, regardless of whether you want to blame Microsoft or those who write drivers for hardware. Wonky network performance, slow file transfers, overbearing UAC annoyances, and incompatibilities all took a toll on Vista's reputation, and that whole ugly "Vista Capable" lawsuit didn't exactly help the OS's image.

But we're on Windows 7 now, arguably Microsoft's finest hour in OS creation. It's been a year since Windows 7 came out, and with support for XP (and Office 2003) set to end in April 2014, it's high time XP users man-up and leave the borderline legacy OS behind, at least if you work in the IT industry.


"You may find yourself in a situation where these migrations become the dominant projects in your organizations over the next few months," said David Cappuccio, an analyst with Gartner. "It's just a fact of life that we can only milk a cow for so long."

Cappuccio isn't the only one who recognizes the need to move on.

"Over the summer, we just had a round of 'firefighting' where we had a bunch of Windows XP SP2 machines that had to get upgraded to Service Pack 3 because of end-of-life support," said Matt Holmes, systems manager for Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kansas. "I think it kind of snuck up on the desktop support folks."

Are you still rocking Windows XP on one or more of you machines? What OSes do you run at work or home?