Though the market share of XP has been dropping. The only real users left are those who don't know what an OS is and only uses it to check AOL in ie6 and businesses who are too stupid to upgrade their horribly dated software.
Instead of simply just spelling out with a very straight forward table what will be eligible they kept releasing vague and confusing press releases.
I've read articles which have claimed (amongst other things):
- Windows XP+ will be eligible (untrue).
- Pirated copies of Windows will be eligible (untrue?).
- Everyone can upgrade but there is a subscription fee (untrue).
- Windows 8 and 8.1 gets the free upgrade only (untrue).
And many others. Microsoft could trivially have let people know exactly what to expect a year ago when they announced this program. It is a good program, I mean free stuff, but the messaging on it was just awful.
PS - I still, to this day, don't feel like I have a complete overview of what is and is not included.
We've probably long passed the point of "sufficient for the average user" in terms of OS features, as things like Chromebooks have shown, but even for not-so-average users like me who do mostly embedded work with some desktop application stuff, it does what I need without getting in the way.
I'd sooner switch completely to Linux, which I've been working with on my servers, than "upgrade"...
I do local IT. Word of mouth side job stuff. Its nice to remind myself why Windows is shit down in the trenches sometimes, and its a lot easier to manually uninstall a half dozen viruses and edit out registry rootkits for an hour after a week of coding.
I normally bill pretty standard in home support freelancer rates, $60 an hour with a minimum $80 to come. If I ever find a computer running Windows XP, I always offer and implore the owner (assuming they are not dependent on some software that has no Linux surrogate) to let me throw Lubuntu 14.04 on the thing. I do it for free, and offer up to three hours of tutoring also for free, because Windows XP is literally cancer. Its a tumor you don't know is there until it goes malignant and kills you by having some unpublished never to be patched exploit used to wreck your PC and steal all your personal information or lock you out. Its more unsafe than unprotected sex in a sleazy strip club.
Feature wise, Lubuntu matches pretty much perfectly, and even people still using XP often have Android phones, so the Lubuntu software center makes a lot more sense to people than have Play Store experience. Its not like anyone using these computers needs performance out of them - if they were trying to run a business or do anything intensive enough to require proprietary Windows only software they would have certainly updated the machine once in the last decade. They almost always are exclusively doing word processing and email, often not even web browsing because these are systems stuck with IE8 at best. And Lubutu does both of those things much better than XP ever did with auto-updating Firefox / Libreoffice and one click system upgrades every two years for LTS releases.
So yeah, switch to Linux, please. Your OS is hugely insecure and nobody is ever going to fix it.
XP is only "insecure" if you're the kind of person who would download and run random executables without any real thought, or use IE on default settings.
The "treat the user like an idiot" "security" of newer Windows is precisely why I'm still using XP. I don't need a nanny of an OS. I rarely need to install new software anyway.
In fact I'd say that malware is increasingly going to target features found only in newer OSs... when the WMF exploit (remember that?) was going around, I was still using 98SE, which was completely unaffected by the exploit code since it used NT-specific features and attackers were targeting those OSs at the time. A lot of the rootkit-y stuff won't even run on 9x because of that.
What has changed, has not all been for the better.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Win...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Win...
(There's no article I can find for Windows 10 yet.)
