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Microsoft ends support for Windows XP and Office 2003

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Re: Microsoft ends support for Windows XP and Office 2003

#91

Post by peeters »

Ellipsis753 wrote: post #83

I've heard a few people saying that they're staying with Windows XP in their company internally. The idea being that as the internal computers share a single access point to the Internet that they can filter everything incoming there. This doesn't really sound correct and obviously it won't help for physically bringing in USB sticks etc but I'm still interested to know what others think here? Is there about to be a l…

Malware detection in a firewall/proxy is already very common. See Blue Coat, FireEye etc.

Re: Microsoft ends support for Windows XP and Office 2003

#92

Post by m_mueller »

mhurron wrote: post #81
Ricapar wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IE8 is a problem because many big enterprises still run it. I know of several big US corporations that, even though they run Windows 7 now, still deploy it with IE8 for compatibility with legacy applications. Once you start dealing with big corporations, it's not as simple as "oh it's time to update".

Unless you're targeting enterprise customers, is that really much of a problem?

It's not just enterprise. For consumer websites the usage is going to hover around 3-5% (IE6,7,8 combined) for a long time - if you target less technically inclined people probably more. Tablets and Smartphones probably help more than Win7+ adoption in that area, but there's still going to be a significant amount of people using browsers on older computers.

Re: Microsoft ends support for Windows XP and Office 2003

#93

Post by CodeCube »

nyrina wrote: post #78
CodeCube wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

/barf That reminded me of a company I worked at. We were moving to a new datacenter, and the job of auditing and moving all of the scheduled tasks fell to me. A good 75% of the scheduled tasks were .exes for which we did not have the source code; and they all had connection strings hardcoded. Thankfully, they were built in .NET, so I was able to decompile them, move the hardcoded stuff to .config files, and get it mo…

What did you use to decompile them into a project that was actually good enough to read through, change the needed things and compile it again?

I just used Reflector, which, at the time was free. There were a few issues that I had to tweak since reflector didn't do well with things like switch statements ... but for the most part it wasn't too bad. I was able to discern most of the munged variable names just by looking at the code and being familiar with the domain of the company.

Re: Microsoft ends support for Windows XP and Office 2003

#94

Post by Maakuth »

jmnicolas wrote: post #61
Maakuth wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you should do is to encapsulate these apps to virtual machines with reduced-credential users, tight firewall settings, non-essential services disabled, etc. If possible, create a separate virtual storage medium for the application data and snapshot the operating system & app virtual disk so that any changes to it will not persist.

This is what I have been doing. The users have a hard time understanding what a VM is. It's a bit magical for them. And I can't make Vm-Ware Player work with a scanner ...

There is USB passthrough in VirtualBox at least, though it's a bit shaky especially with Windows hosts.

Re: Microsoft ends support for Windows XP and Office 2003

#95

Post by johnchristopher »

jenscow wrote: post #89
johnchristopher wrote: post #37

I would like to read an article about whether or not an up-to-date anti-virus is going to protect users (how and why) as a lot of IT people defend that position.

Exactly. Any AV worth it's salt should pick up something that a security update should have fixed.

But that's the catch: I am not convinced AV vendors have the resources, the complete knowledge and the access to Windows inner workings to fill in MS role.

And what about the legal rights ? Would they be allowed to patch a security kernel breach, or a lib, made up of closed proprietary code in binary format (an extreme and unlikely case but that's what I read when IT people tell users "we'll just use an anti-virus to circumvent the lack of MS updates") ?

Re: Microsoft ends support for Windows XP and Office 2003

#96

Post by danielweber »

jenscow wrote: post #87
skyebook wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or there's always the paid Canonical support. But the thought of David Cameron hunched over a laptop having some tea and getting assistance from lazer420 in saving the NHS from the next heartbleed is priceless.

No, they ask their IT department. The difference being, they can fix issues with the OS themselves (or hire someone to). With something closed like Windows, there's only one place to go for support.

If you are a major customer, like many national governments are, you can get the source code to a lot of Windows.

Re: Microsoft ends support for Windows XP and Office 2003

#97

Post by mhurron »

m_mueller wrote: post #92
mhurron wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you're targeting enterprise customers, is that really much of a problem?

It's not just enterprise. For consumer websites the usage is going to hover around 3-5% (IE6,7,8 combined) for a long time - if you target less technically inclined people probably more. Tablets and Smartphones probably help more than Win7+ adoption in that area, but there's still going to be a significant amount of people using browsers on older computers.

> hover around 3-5% (IE6,7,8 combined)

I do not see the point of worrying about this. If enterprise (put forward as the major user of these) is the worry then you might have to care. If it's random users that just don't feel like running Windows Update, well, these people aren't going to be spending much money anyway.

Worrying about [insert version of IE here] hanging around forever seems to be nothing but complaining for the sake of complaining now that IE6 is completely out of the picture.

Re: Microsoft ends support for Windows XP and Office 2003

#98

Post by FollowSteph3 »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #64
FollowSteph3 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people don't realize it but Apple does this all the time. Goos luck running most 5+ year old mac on the latest Mac OS X ;)

OS X Mavericks today runs on some machines that are 7 years old. True, that's still not great, but better than you claimed.

Define "some". The percentage is very low even at the 5 year mark ;)

Re: Microsoft ends support for Windows XP and Office 2003

#99

Post by FedRegister »

taspeotis wrote: post #30
elnate wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes them specific to XP instead of just Windows?

Probably code that relies on implementation details and only works by coincidence. We had a bug in our application that only manifested on Windows 8 and later. The problem was that we were passing NULL instead of some other sentinel value (MSDN said to use a specific sentinel value). XP/Vista/7 took NULL anyway and the effect was the same as the sentinel value but in Windows 8 it did something different.

That's exactly something that an app compatibility shim should fix.

Re: Microsoft ends support for Windows XP and Office 2003

#100

Post by yuhong »

xjh wrote: post #32
yuhong wrote: post #2

Technically security updates are released at 10am PST on Patch Tuesday. http://amirunningxp.com/ got this wrong (they used midnight instead).

It prints "You are NOT running Windows XP" on x64 XP.

That is because it is actually based on Server 2003.
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