Page 1 of RIP XP

I'm now getting the countdown clock for XP (5days 13 hours).

What's the reality when the time expires? Obviously thousands (millions?) of PC's aren't going to do a mission impossible and disappear in a puff of smoke. Neither is the whole financial sector going to explode as passwords are sprayed about like digital confetti. Or one ginormous botnet starts taking over the world.

So what is actually likely to occur to my poor knackered old Dell?


Snaps

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My new Flash Fiction blog. All my own work
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I used to be with it, but then they changed what `it` was.
Now, what I`m with isn`t it, and what`s `it` seems weird and scary

Quote:
Snaps says...
"So what is actually likely to occur to my poor knackered old Dell?"
Most likely a load of vulnerabilities that Microsoft don't know about, haven't patched and nefarious people are sitting on waiting for the deadline, will start popping up on dodgy and hacked websites.

Providing you don't use Internet Explorer or Outlook Express, and have a good anti-virus utility (like Avast), you'll probably be fine for a fair while yet. Unless someone discovers a remote exploit, but even then you'll probably be okay if your computer is sitting on a NAT subnet.


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Firefox, Thunderbird and Microsoft Security Essentials.
I have no idea what a NAT subnet is.

Snaps

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My new Flash Fiction blog. All my own work
500ish

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I used to be with it, but then they changed what `it` was.
Now, what I`m with isn`t it, and what`s `it` seems weird and scary

As Rob says, if it's a work pc behind security measures like hardware firewalls etc, fingers crossed it will be ok (I know us at work are hoping that's the case)

if it's a home pc, if you MUST have your XP machine connected to the internet, keep anti virus and firewall up to date etc.

ppl used to say MSE was enough, and MS are going to support it for another year, but even they have admitted more or less that it's better than nothing, but not as good as a proper anti virus solution. another vote for free avast here.

as I said in the other thread, it may be afield day for crackers tryingto reverse engineer Win 7, 8 patches to see what they do, to see if they can use those fixes to exploit vulnerabilities in XP.

Sounds like ditch security essentials, back to Avast and fingers crossed till the funding for a new PC is amassed.

Presumably ditch the Windows firewall and back to maybe Zonealarm as well?

Snaps

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My new Flash Fiction blog. All my own work
500ish

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I used to be with it, but then they changed what `it` was.
Now, what I`m with isn`t it, and what`s `it` seems weird and scary

Quote:
admars says...
"As Rob says, if it's a work pc behind security measures like hardware firewalls etc, fingers crossed it will be ok (I know us at work are hoping that's the case)"
You're still running XP at work? Is that because of some sort of legacy app?







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Quote:
Snaps says...
"Presumably ditch the Windows firewall and back to maybe Zonealarm as well?"
Windows firewall is fine!


Editor
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Quote:
Chris Gould says...
"You're still running XP at work? Is that because of some sort of legacy app?"
yeh, we have win 7 hosts, but XP VMs to run vb6 :(  we've tried pointing out that xp end of life is a good reason to finally ditch some of the legacy vb6 stuff so everything is .net but I guess you don't make money out of scheduling ppl to do that :(

Personally I'm in the 'I wouldn't go on the internet and certainly wouldn't be doing any home banking on XP after April 8th' camp.
I think it will be targeted and really looked at for finding exploits etc.
M$ themselves said a good while back not to even use or rely on MSE.  Avast a great, free alternative.
While M$ relented recently and extended support for MSE itself (for current users) that doesn't necessarily extend to the OS itself..

Ste

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We will pay the price but we will not count the cost..

Ello ello ello

Snaps

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My new Flash Fiction blog. All my own work
500ish

---

I used to be with it, but then they changed what `it` was.
Now, what I`m with isn`t it, and what`s `it` seems weird and scary