The now 6 years old Windows XP almost gets to its end. In 2008 Microsoft stops selling individual XP-licenses of it. After that the support will be reduced and at the end there will be no more updates available.
What kinds of consequences does this have for you, for how long can still you work with XP and what kinds of Windows development can you expect?
Microsoft will still bring out security updates for Windows XP Home and Windows XP Professional for about 7 years from now on.
The next Service Pack (SP3) is announced for the first half of 2008. After that there will be maybe 1 or 2 more, but that’s it.
The normal life cycle of Windows is 10 years. 5 years mainstream support and 5 years extended support. The in 2001 launched XP will be provided with updates until 2014. That’s 14 years. This prolongation is thanks to SP2.
This Service Pack brought so many new functionalities, like a firewall, Internet Explorer with pop-up blocker and ‘no-execute’-technology. The optimization of XP got so many priority that the development of Vista was postponed.
What even more unusual is, is that Microsoft also maintains the Home version 13 years long. Normally systems for home usage can count on 5 year mainstream support. There is no 5 years extra support for these systems. Based on this strategy the Vista Home-versions (also Vista Ultimate) will no longer be maintained after 2012 so they will be ‘ended’ even earlier then XP Home!
Because the end of Windows XP is nearby we put together a ‘XP forever’-pack, which includes all the necessary systems expansions so you can still work with XP for a long time and you can make XP like Vista.
Because the two operating systems Windows XP and Windows Vista aren’t that different from each other technically, Vista is not safer then XP! The thing is that Vista handles security aspects a bit more flexible. The benefits of making XP like Vista is that, using the following tools, you can restore that balance and you can use XP for a much longer time.
So now we are going to make XP like Vista using the following tools. We even transform the XP look into the Vista look. To see which tools we are going to use to make XP look like Vista look at this website: http://www.windows-vista-tips-and-tricks.com/xp-like-vista.html Here you find a complete explanation about all the tools and here you can download all the tools. Enjoy transforming your XP computer into a Vista computer.