Advice requested on what to tell Windows XP Clients

If their custom apps work with Windows XP, then they clearly do not need more than 4GB of RAM. I haven't found a program yet that does not work under Windows 7 32-bit that was written from the WinXP days.

Windows 8 on the other hand....several problems, especially with printers. See if you can still get Win7 licenses.
 
Dogs said:
Then you haven't been reading my posts or you've been choosing to ignore them. If you're stuck having some users running on XP (and by this I mean situations where you can't just lock them up in the basement and network them to be completely isolated from everything but what they need to talk to), it's plainly obvious that having them run XP-mode is safer because the software which requires XP will be the only thing running on XP. You won't have users opening emails and visiting websites and opening PDFs and plugging in flash-drives to an XP system. You can use bridged-networking mode to lock down connectivity of the XP-mode virtual machine without locking down the rest of the room. If you just have users doing open work on an XP machine, you will have users opening everything imaginable under XP, and you won't be able to lock down the system from the rest of the network..
Click to expand...

This isn't intrinsic to virtualization, though. You could lock down a physical XP machine in the same way (turn off internet access, limit flash drives, etc). I'm a security professional and for our remaining XP machines, we're locking them down in a very similiar sort of way. Don't need virtualization to do that.

That's extra steps beyond just virtualizing...or at least, using virtualization as your tool to do some of that.
 
Last edited:
I would tell them that as of the pull date, I will not be held liable for anything that happens to their XP machines or anything they attach to (file server etc). I would gladly charge per incident to fix it, but would not be held liable.
 
GreenMonkey said:
This isn't intrinsic to virtualization, though. You could lock down a physical XP machine in the same way (turn off internet access, limit flash drives, etc).
Click to expand...

Not if the user needs things like network access, which is realistic if the XP software in question is not the only thing the computer will be used for. After all, it can be costly to allocate an entire computer to just one application, and have each user use a separate computer for everything else.
 
I've mentioned to all of my XP clients about the end of support, but I don't feel like I really have any duty to "convince" them to upgrade beyond simply presenting them with the facts involved. They can run whatever they want, and if I end up having to make more frequent trips to the bank, then so be it...
 
GotNoRice said:
I've mentioned to all of my XP clients about the end of support, but I don't feel like I really have any duty to "convince" them to upgrade beyond simply presenting them with the facts involved. They can run whatever they want, and if I end up having to make more frequent trips to the bank, then so be it...
Click to expand...

In a perfect world, yes, but it generally ends up being the case that no matter how many times you tell them "Staying on XP will cost you more money because it will need more work to keep it working", the clients blame you for not 'fixing it right', because they have to keep calling you. Many business users have no concept that their problems are a direct consequence of their decisions.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top