Re: windows XP
The old story that many websites are only programed for IE is just that, every since FF came a few years ago, and especially with the advent of android and smart phones and tablets, rarely will you find a website that is only IE friendly these days.
I use XP on a couple of machines, because much of the stuff I do, won't work in win7 or win8, as far as linux, I have a machine that runs linux and use it quite a bit, but it is for development purposes, many of the programs for linux are not really as user friendly as many of the windows programs, such as professional level photography processing, my wife runs a internet company with close to 400 websites how designed and hosted, in addition she does ad layout and magazine layout and design. Linux won't cut it for her, she however runs win7. It is funny, I have heard this, watch out, someone is going to get you every single time MS stopped supporting an OS. Running unix servers with apache for over 16 years now has taught me a lot and I learned a lot when I was younger doing development work for Symantec and Intel, I grew up a few miles from both those companies in the late 70's before I went off to the service. I was essentially a hacker back in those days and they found me! LOL! When I was in the service, I worked a lot in PC development with the major companies, because we used them in strategy planning for quite a few different things, as an Officer I was privy to quite a bit of stuff.
Since I retired, guess what I have been doing? Day in and Day out, I play with computers, currently I have 8 computers set up in addition to a 10 piece Cisco rack, with 5 switches and 5 routers and just ordered a New Dell Poweredge server yesterday. All of our computers are set up behind a Cisco hardwall Firewall system, in addition to Softwall firewalls running on all computers. I have no problem writing a driver for XP, it is pretty basic stuff.
But as I said, most people are not involved at the level I am and would be better off upgrading to a current OS, that gets updates regularly.
To each his own I say, but I believe the fear over the stopping support for XP is a bit overblown, XP is a very stable system, with lots of information as well as lots of safe programs out there. Basically the internet was built on XP and has grown to the point it is because of XP, sorry to see them stop supporting it, but understand their reason, we have a lot better hardware tech available now, than when it came out. XP is not going to go unstable because people are not writing software anymore, but if you are planning to upgrade your hardware, it is time to upgrade your OS.
Again, I have been through this since the day that the first MS operating system was introduced and I was working with DOS long before that, both Tandy DOS as well as IBM DOS. Did a lot of line by line programming in BASIC as well on an old Atari and Commodore VIC 16.
Anyway, just be careful out there and pay attention and you will be ok.
Nice conversation to say the least. Here is a shot of my rack:
