Safe to run Win XP after M$ pulls plug next year?

[cbelt3]

Win 7 fast. XP loses security updates. Kind of like driving NASCAR in a 1960's stock car with no safety equipment . Squish..

[decay]

cars from the early 50s didn't always come with seat belts.

sure, you can still drive 'em. might not get in an accident.

or ya might.

[mrlynn]

Well, I'm running our legacy EMR client on XP. I have a couple of Win7 clients, but not everything works. So I intend to keep running the XP boxes (and XP on my Macs, via Parallels and Fusion) for as long as we need to access that software. It may be a few years yet.

OTOH, I won't be using it for Internet browsing, so I don't expect the lack of security updates to be a problem.

/Mr Lynn

[gabester]

Mind you, I think you'd be better off with a current linux distro than XP at this point.
Depending on what you're doing with Windows XP you may be able to safely use it.
However, your highest native browser version will be IE8.
Eventually FireFox and Chrome will no longer be updated for the platform. Along with Flash, Java, and all those other things you may use that may need updates.
So if you're fine using years old software, go for it. Just be aware that should zero day exploits come to light they won't be patched and in that sense the system will be quite vulnerable. If you're not putting any kind of sensitive information on it, I wouldn't worry about it too much. You could look at using something like Faronics Deep Freeze to lock the system down to prevent the malware from getting to you. Or do all your surfing in a VM or two that is locked down.