Today, April 8, finally sees Microsoft cut the cord on Windows XP after more than eleven years of support — or does it?

Several high-profile public service and financial institutions, including American bank JP Morgan and the UK’s National Health Service, will continue to receive support for the OS from Micrsoft — for a price.

‘It’s been seven years since Microsoft announced the deadline for XP.’

While it is hard to begrudge a core public service like the NHS paying for an added year of ‘breathing space’ support — after all, no one wants critical systems left vulnerable — it’s also hard to feel entirely content about it.

It’s been seven years since Microsoft announced the deadline, giving everyone, corporate and consumer alike, more than enough time to have instigated migration to something newer. Despite the protests for ‘more time’, this expiry date has not crept up unawares.

In the NHS’ case, more than 85% of its 800,000 computers are said to still run on the antiquated system (14% are on Windows 7, a rogue 1% run Windows 8). Let’s hope that this final prescription helps ween the dependency, rather than add to it.

Time to Go Linux

Thankfully, other governmental sectors in the UK (and worldwide) have prepared.  One London Borough Council is swapping thousands of its Windows machines for Chromebooks — a switch it claims will save an estimated £400,000.

Regular Linux stands to benefit too. A survey conducted earlier this year showed that around 11% of XP users plan to jump over to Linux to avoid fallout from the XP-ocalypse.

We think that Linux, specifically the lightweight distribution Lubuntu, is the best trade-up solution for home users ambling along on the aged system. To drive the message home we’ve thrown together a small advert extolling the virtues via trendy flat vectors and concise snippets of text:

If you know people who are still running Windows XP please consider sharing it. You can find a full-sized version here.

Are you still running Windows XP? Do you know someone who is? What OS would you suggest users switch to? Share your thoughts in the comments 

windows xp