On April 14th 2009 – Which incidentally is also one of Microsoft’s “Patch Tuesdays”. – Windows XP leaves Microsoft’s mainstream support and enters extended support.

At seven-years old; XP is already Microsoft’s most successful operating system, partly due to its enhanced longevity.

Normally Microsoft keeps an operating system in mainstream support for 5 years after its release date, and then puts it into extended support for another 5, before retiring it completely. In the case of XP, however, Microsoft were forced to extend the support-lifetime a further 3 years due to the long delay between the releases of XP and Vista. In reality, then, XP has been already living on borrowed time for the last couple of years and a bit more.

Mainstream support includes security and functionality bug-fixes – Also issuing service packs as an extra, which are a condensed form of a compilation of existing and new bug and security fixes encapsulated into a single package for ease of installation.

Extended support, however, includes critical updates and security-related patches only. From April 14th onwards this is all that XP will have issued.

Does that mean that people should stop using XP? Not at all. There is another 5 years of critical-security related support available for XP from April 2009. This means that XP will not become a security risk, like Win 9x and ME now are due to the unavailability of security fixes, until April 2014. My advice for the moment is if you’re comfortable using XP at present then carry on using it for now.

What of its successors? Well in my opinion Vista was a flop, and at this point isn’t worth worrying about. – Although having said that there are a few people, one of whom is an online-friend of mine, who prefer Vista to anything else Microsoft have ever produced. Those people are nevertheless in the minority.

Then there’s Windows 7:  At time of writing, Windows 7 is available in beta form.

(NOTICE: If people who intend to download the beta haven’t yet done so then I do suggest doing so ASAP as a matter of urgency. Microsoft are closing entries to the beta program in a few days time.)

Windows 7 looks promising; but as I’ve stated in an earlier article, Microsoft have decided to issue 6 versions, allegedly in the hope of maximising their profits by doing so. As I said in a comment I made on PC Mech, if it was a choice between Home, pro, and Business versions; I’d go straight out and buy Pro as soon as it was released in RTM format. Now I’m going to wait to let those with the money who are brave enough to do so jump in where angels fear to tread and test the versions, before reporting what the customer will get with each version. Yes I’m hanging back until I know what I’m letting myself in for, and I advise my readers to do the same, unless they happen to be well-off financially and extremely geeky.

For now I’m sticking to XP; and I may well run XP on one of my comps right up until 2014. I may even use it as a standalone system even after that, until the comp it’s installed on packs up beyond reasonable repair through old age.

Are Microsoft going to do their best to kill off XP from April onward as rumour has it? I don’t think they need to in all honesty. I think Windows 7 will do that before long, although not totally. What’s your opinion? Please do comment.