This year, Microsoft forced major retailers to stop supplying XP. In January 2009 even small system builders such as myself will be stopped from supplying XP. Will that be a death knell for XP?

Not immediately, no; but if the pre-beta code reports are anything to go by, then Windows Seven may well be the start of the end for this almost seven-year-old operating system.

Some reports I’ve heard indicate that Microsoft will be launching Seven in October 2009. According to PCWorld.com:

"The word on the blogosphere is that Windows 7 should be released to manufacturing in October 2009 with general availability by November".

Microsoft haven’t yet released anything concrete yet as far as I know – Other than declaring that the new OS will be launched in the latter half of 2009, however some bloggers may be privy to insider information that I have not yet received.

Windows Vista; the disaster of an operating system in many ways, and the major trigger of the minor popularity-loss for the Softies, which did more good for its predecessor XP and the Apple Mac with its osX Unix operating system than anything else, has kept most of those users who continue to use Microsoft’s operating systems (Including myself.) with XP for the time being. In fact this blog’s visitor count indicates that almost 5 times more visitors use XP than use Vista, with a third as many people as those using Vista on a Mac using osX.

Seven is coming; and in my opinion we’ll probably be seeing most of those who upgraded from XP to Vista upgrading to Seven in 2009; as well as probably at least two-thirds of the XP users. That will be probably just as much a death knell for Vista as it will be for XP, if not even more so.

Seven will work on the same hardware as Vista; so there’s really no reason for Vista users not to upgrade. XP users boxes will be starting to clap out in a lot of cases, so those affected will no doubt upgrade equipment and operating system too.

If you have a perfectly good computer that’s still running XP, and either you can’t afford to, don’t want to, or simply can’t move to Seven because of the hardware requirements, then don’t worry:

Currently, as stated in the Microsoft XP Product Support Lifecycle page, partially shown above; they will continue mainstream support for XP until April 2009 – As they are currently doing that is – after which they’ll only be continuing support regarding security issues from that date until the currently scheduled day in April 2014 when XP becomes obsolete.

Then XP will go the way of 9x and ME. By then, however, Seven’s successor will probably have been long released, Vista will have been condemned, and maybe even a successor to Seven’s successor will be in beta?

One of my computers that I recently built from scrap components probably isn’t capable of running anything greater than Vista Home Basic. It has a 64-bit capable motherboard running a 32-bit AMD Sempron 1800MHz processor in a socket configuration that’s already almost obsolete; AMD socket 754. I don’t think they made any dual-core processors in that socket, and even if I could upgrade to a single-core Athlon 64 by buying second-hand, I wouldn’t bother upgrading to Vista. – So that’s one computer which’ll be running XP to 2014; if it lasts that long, that is.

Feel free to comment generally on anything you like in this article: There is a comment box below for that purpose. Have a good day/evening/night/morning, wherever you are on the planet.