Windows XP is just a few weeks from its End-of-Life—what does that mean to you?

Businessman with umbrellaWe’ve been hearing about it for a while now—whether you call it the “sunset date,” End-of-Life date, “end of support date” or any other term, Windows XP is officially falling out of support on April 8th this year. “But what does that actually mean?” you may ask. In short, it means that Microsoft is no longer going to spend any time or resources on Windows XP.  Does this mean that your Windows XP machine will suddenly stop working this spring? Well, no, nothing so drastic. However, it is critical that you upgrade from XP as soon as possible. There are several reasons why:

  • Your computer will stop receiving critical updates. Microsoft is no longer going to be writing updates for XP. This means that any bugs, errors, or needed hotfixes will no longer go out. More importantly, you will no longer receive any security updates. These security updates fix the exploits or “loopholes” in the code of your system that hackers and malware authors use to author viruses, breach your security, and/or gain access to your data.
  • Any existing XP machines on your network can be a vulnerability for the rest of your infrastructure. If you have an XP machine that is vulnerable to every new infection that enters the wild sitting on your network, some of those threats can use that machine to get their proverbial foot in the door—and use the infected machine as a staging ground for attacks on the rest of your network.
  • Starting on April 8th, if you have any machines running XP, you will fall out of security compliance. For those of you who have to maintain HIPAA compliance or similar legal requirements of maintaining privacy and data security, maintaining an XP-based system will be a breach of the requirement to implement "procedures for guarding against, detecting, and reporting malicious software." Even if you’re not in the medical field, other compliance agencies will tend toward the same line of thinking.
  • Other software will fall out of support. For those of you with smartphones, this may sound familiar—as your device gets older, you will find more and more frequently that the apps you want to run stop updating, or you can’t download newer apps at all, because they do not support your model anymore. The same is true of PC programs—you may still find old programs that will run on XP, but developers will stop spending the time and effort on building or optimizing programs and updates that will run on XP.
  • Maintenance costs will go up. As Microsoft withdraws support for XP, between the greatly increased risk of software issues and the rapidly increasing paucity of available tools and information for troubleshooting XP-based machines, it will become increasingly expensive to continue to maintain XP systems, resulting in more cash out of your pocket to manage those machines. Think about it—would you rather deal with ratcheting costs to maintain an old system, or would you rather put that money toward a newer, cleaner, more powerful system?

“Does that mean I have to buy a whole new computer?” No… at least, not necessarily. It’s absolutely possible to use the same hardware and simply load a newer version of Windows. However, your current computer may or may not be outdated. If it is, the hardware may not meet the minimum requirements for running Windows 7 or 8 (according to your preference), in which case it will need to be upgraded, or more likely replaced. In fact, even if you do meet the minimum system requirements, if you’ve even been considering updating your hardware, there’s no time like the present: often, you can get a much better deal on Windows if it comes as part of a new computer. Also, you’ll save on setup: it is usually faster, easier, and cheaper to bring up a new system than it is to try to switch the OS on an existing platform. All told, depending on your needs, a brand-new system may be only a relatively minor cost difference over an in-place upgrade—and who doesn’t like that new-computer smell?

Whatever you decide, April 8th is just around the corner—give RTS a call, and we can discuss options and figure out what plan is right for you.


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