quote:
Originally posted by ShawnZ
quote:
Originally posted by Jarrod
quote:
Originally posted by ShawnZ
windows XP isn't supported by microsoft anymore
quote:
Originally posted by Microsoft
We plan to provide support for Windows XP until 2014.
*checks date
sources: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-xp/future.aspx
http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?LN=en-gb&C2=1173
mainstream support is over 
Which means nothing for the normal consumer.... XP will be supported till 2014 as Jarrod said.
The only difference between mainstream and extended support is that you can't claim a warranty anymore, or request a feature change. And free incident/personal support isn't given anymore either. All things which are hardly used anyways (most people don't even know they exist or where to go to request that kind of support).
And it is not because MS stops all support for an OS that the OS suddenly wouldn't work anymore or that people stop using it or stop developping for it. Bug-wise XP has become very mature, which is something you can hardly say about Vista and Win7. Although Vista and Win7 are, out-of-the-box, indeed more secure than XP. But that also means they are, out-of-the-box, more 'restricted' (which some people find very annoying).
Personaly I would not switch to Win7, especially if you are used to XP and already have some computer experience. If you are just a 'beginner', than it might be another case. Either way, personaly I think it is still way to early and there are still too many problems with it (especially driver-wise).
Oh, and performance-wise: both Vista and Win7 run slower than XP in my experience. That is, the thing is that most people do not make a fair comparisson. They compare a very much used XP on a pentium4 with a brand new Win7 on a quad core so to speak. Of course Win7 and your programs, are going to run faster in that case.
But if you compare all the (32bit) OSs on the same machine, with the same amount of usage and programs (the more you do, install, remove, etc on an OS, the slower it eventually gets in the long run), with the same default out-of-the-box settings (eye-candy etc), than you would find that XP is the faster though.
Of course the question would be if such a comparisson is usefull. I mean, why would you run a 32-bit XP on a brand new 64-bit quad core monster with 6GB of RAM? So, in the end, the question shouldn't be which is faster, but is your PC powerfull enough to benefit from the new OS? If so, then by all means get the newer OS. If not, then you will not gain much performance by installing a newer OS, on the contrary, everything might run a lot slower.
Then there is also the work performance of yourself. Using the new OSs (Vista and Win7) also means learning a few new things as the user interface is changed compared to XP and its predecessors. Many stuff can't be found anymore in the places you are used to, but are moved somewhere else. For some people this might be a problem. This is by the way one of the reasons (together with the obvious extremely high costs) why companies will not move to new OSs as fast. In fact it usually takes many many years before they move to a new OS.
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