The Death of Windows XP and What to Do About It

-

In April 2014, Microsoft will cease support for Windows XP. This means that all computers running that ancient operating system will be sitting ducks for hackers who find and exploit security holes.

Our home computer runs Windows XP. The entire whirring contraption should have been replaced about 4 years ago, but we're holding on. Now that Microsoft is giving up support for XP, I have been mulling my options.

I could buy a copy of Windows 7 from eBay, assuming my desktop machine can handle it. (I'm guessing that Windows 8.1 is out of the question.) But why buy an OS when you can get one for free? 

Ubuntu, a distribution of Linux, is built for the novice Linux user. It relies heavily on its well designed graphical user interface, and not so much on the command-line. That's great for those who are used to point-and-click Windows.

I installed Ubuntu as a secondary operating system on my ageing PC (dual boot). Setting it up was easy and it took me only a short time to find my way around the major sections of the operating system. True, I have used Linux a little, so some of the Linux-y concepts were familiar to me.

Surprisingly, Ubuntu is a decent option in a post-XP world. I just have to figure out how to get the Internet connection to run at the same speed as it does on XP. And I will also need to find Linux equivalents to those Windows programs that we use often, such as Corel Video Studio Pro X4.

Or I could grab on tight, stick with XP, and hope my computer dies of natural causes before an anonymous teenager in a dingy basement in Belarus zaps it out of its misery.

Comments

  1. UnknownOctober 16, 2013 at 9:23 AM

    Nice point about converting computer to Linux. I might just end up replacing my creaking monster anyways.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Playing With My Mind

-
G-d is playing with my mind. A few months ago my wife and I decided to buy a lottery ticket. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision. What irked me was knowing, not so very deep in my heart, that I was flushing money down the drain. I mean, what are the odds? According to this site on Lottery Math, The odds of a "Lotto" style lottery can be found with the formula: n! / (n - r)! r! where n is the highest numbered ball and r is the number of balls chosen. This is called in math a combination . An easier way to think about it is if there are 40 balls and 6 are chosen, there are 40 possible numbers that can come up first, leaving 39 that can come up second, then 38, 37, 36, and finally 35 on the final number. To find out how many numbers that is you multiply 40 ×39 ×38 ×37 ×36 × 35 = 2,763,633,600 making the odds 2 and a half billion to one. Two and a half billion to one?! The money spent on the ticket could easily have gone to purchasing at least one bottle of beer with a 100% cha...
Read more

Act Your Age, Not Your Shoe Size

-
Image
The other day I was traveling to work and the conversation on the bus was more animated than usual, which means that there was conversation on the bus. One of my colleagues joked that although he is 40, he has a mental age of 17. In other words, he still thinks he's Superboy when he's actually more like the father from the Wonder Years. This got me thinking about what my mental age is. I also sometimes feel like I'm still a teenager. In fact, I cracked a joke the other day and my daughter's friend remarked that my jokes are just as good as Eitan's. Who'se Eitan? Her nearly-thirteen-year-old brother. The phrase "act your age, not your shoe size" would not really apply in this situation because using the  Australian shoe size chart , my joke was almost spot on, give or take 2.5 years. There are a number of ways I can measure my mental age: Self assessment Friend Psychologist I decided that none of these options would be accurate enough. For st...
Read more

Lessons from a Couch

-
Image
I was looking around at the electronic devices we use everyday. None of them are single-function, for example: My mobile phone is also my camera, diary, MP3 player, GPS device and multimedia device My camera is also a YouTube uploader, GPS tracker and a photo-editing device My desk phone at work is also an address book My MP3 player is also a radio and a storage device My e-book reader also surfs the web Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that HTC has developed a number of smart phones with Facebook deeply embedded into the interface and that there are dozens more planned for release in the near future. I recall the good old days when a phone was used to make phone calls. Now, every device we have needs to be able to do more than one thing. In fact, one of the hallmarks of a modern smart-phone is that it is "multitasking" - that it has the ability to run two or more applications simultaneously with the ability to switch between them. Older smart-phone operating syste...
Read more