What other drawback (beside security) on XP & office 2003 ending support in Apr 2014?

pxc said:
The first thing to do in that situation is right click and update driver, search online, and there's a good chance one or more of those devices has a reference driver available from MS.


After all that, it's possible that there may not be one or more device drivers available. In that case, a replacement card (PCI or PCIe or USB) for that device would need to be used if that functionality is essential..
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if there is a driver from mircosoft, shouldn't win 7 automatically find that driver in the 1st place? As to your 2nd pt., that's exactly what needed to be done. In 1 case, some1 upgraded to win 7, there is no driver for ethernet, so I have to buy a PCI card to insert in the PC because there is no driver.

And the pt. is, the time spent on digging out that many drivers, costs more than the PCI card itself.

But what is a bigger concern, is not the video or audio, or ethernet driver, rather, the windows core drivers.

Say you just bought a brand new motherboard, and it does c/w win 7 drivers. So you installed a fresh win 7 OS on the PC. And the next thing you should do, is to install all those drivers from the manufacturers CD.

If you don't, you'll see a list of yellow ! on those core drivers, such as USB 3.0 drivers, storage controller drivers, and those are hard to find by searching on the internet. And needless to say, even if you miss 1, you can't get win 7 to work properly.
 
TCM said:
Pirates to the rescue. You can run XP without any activation crap since forever.
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by that argument, you can do the same thing w/ win 7. there are hacker s/w out there that c/w win 7 activator
 
Happy Hopping said:
if there is a driver from mircosoft, shouldn't win 7 automatically find that driver in the 1st place? As to your 2nd pt., that's exactly what needed to be done. In 1 case, some1 upgraded to win 7, there is no driver for ethernet, so I have to buy a PCI card to insert in the PC because there is no driver.

And the pt. is, the time spent on digging out that many drivers, costs more than the PCI card itself.

But what is a bigger concern, is not the video or audio, or ethernet driver, rather, the windows core drivers.

Say you just bought a brand new motherboard, and it does c/w win 7 drivers. So you installed a fresh win 7 OS on the PC. And the next thing you should do, is to install all those drivers from the manufacturers CD.

If you don't, you'll see a list of yellow ! on those core drivers, such as USB 3.0 drivers, storage controller drivers, and those are hard to find by searching on the internet. And needless to say, even if you miss 1, you can't get win 7 to work properly.
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They're not hard to find at all. Open device manager, find the device and vendor ids from the device properties page, and plug them into Google. 9 times out 10 one of the first 5 links will tell you exactly what the device is and how to get the driver for it; there may even be a direct link to the manufacturers download page.

As for installing drivers off the CD, absolutely not unless I just can't do without one (i.e. Ethernet) long enough to get all updated drivers from the Internet.



The original topic had to do with support ending for XP and the security implications that entails. Here's how it's going to work out for you:

1) Stick with XP and hope your AV and the dwindling popularity of XP keeps you safe from any future exploits that will never be patched.

2) Upgrade to Windows 7 or 8. If necessary, you'll have to hunt for drivers that aren't embedded in Windows and replace unsupported hardware and software (if possible).

3) Switch to an alternative OS... and hope you don't have any software that isn't available on that platform. But you'll have an even harder time dealing with drivers.


Pick your poison. You'll either be chasing drivers or cleaning infections. Either way, if you're doing this for a company, they'll be getting their money's worth out of you.
 
I have done numerous drivers search on various cases. Let me gives 2 e.g:

1) 2 mth. ago, some sony laptop, running XP has a corrupted audio driver, using that sony model name, spent hours looking for that driver. Ends up having some false drivers that some ?? website wants to charge for it. In the end, turn out those japanese sony are idiots, the model name on the laptop is NOT the real model name of the driver.

2) in another case back in Dec., I did what you told me, it's a Win 7 wireless ethernet driver on a HP laptop, I download and installed the microsoft ver. of that driver. Totally does not work. In the end, turns out it's the HP ver. that can get it to work. Now imagine it's XP, and I go w/ your idea of a microsoft driver, instead of the manufacturer's ver. of that same driver. It would have go nowhere.
 
Happy Hopping said:
if there is a driver from mircosoft, shouldn't win 7 automatically find that driver in the 1st place? As to your 2nd pt., that's exactly what needed to be done. In 1 case, some1 upgraded to win 7, there is no driver for ethernet, so I have to buy a PCI card to insert in the PC because there is no driver.

And the pt. is, the time spent on digging out that many drivers, costs more than the PCI card itself.

But what is a bigger concern, is not the video or audio, or ethernet driver, rather, the windows core drivers.

Say you just bought a brand new motherboard, and it does c/w win 7 drivers. So you installed a fresh win 7 OS on the PC. And the next thing you should do, is to install all those drivers from the manufacturers CD.

If you don't, you'll see a list of yellow ! on those core drivers, such as USB 3.0 drivers, storage controller drivers, and those are hard to find by searching on the internet. And needless to say, even if you miss 1, you can't get win 7 to work properly.
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Bitching about driver support on Windows 7 for modern hardware is pretty laughable, especially ethernet. The most common onboard ethernet are native supported by 7 out of the box. Windows XP simply doesn't support half of the stuff you mentioned out of the box, and you're going to spend more time hunting for drivers for your ancient-ancient OS anyway, if it's even supported at all.

If you're doing this for your own personal "enjoyment", you have a problem, and you should seek help.

If you're doing this for work, I hope you enjoy not getting paid overtime, since IT is exempt almost everywhere.

In all reality you're probably over 60, and afraid of change or unable to keep up. That's fine. We'll all be there at some point (hopefully).. but not yet!
 
Happy Hopping said:
if there is a driver from mircosoft, shouldn't win 7 automatically find that driver in the 1st place?
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That's a good suggestion, but no, you have to click the search online button instead of browsing in the update driver dialog. Windows installer finds the included drivers on disc, but does not automatically search online for any missing drivers. Same behavior since Win9x, so it's nothing new.

Of course if you have no network access you'll need to copy and install at least those drivers using a different method. If no network drivers are available, and that is essential, then installing a USB adapter or PCI/PCIe card is probably required. That's nothing new either. People who upgrade their OS on older hardware have had to do that for a long time too. Landfills are full of obsolete hardware tossed from working systems.
 
octoberasian said:
Looking at this from a non-security viewpoint, my issue is with compatibility with some software.

And, it varies from person to person, computer to computer, software to software.

I'll give you a good example.

A friend plays Final Fantasy XI. The graphics engine is both CPU-bound (relies little on the GPU) and is DirectX 8.1-based. He gets the same issues with both Windows 7 and Windows 8 (both 64-bit) with his Radeon HD 6870. These issues are massive texture flickering on all player characters, NPCs, and monsters. This computer has a GIgabyte board and i7 920.

He upgraded his computer to brand new parts-- CPU, GPU, board, PSU, memory-- which are an i7-4670K and a different board manufacturer, ASUS. His video card this time was a Radeon HD 7950.

Guess what? Same graphical issues with both Windows 7 and Windows 8. Catalyst drivers 12.10 to 13.6 Beta were tested as well. Nothing fixed it whether using Windower, turning off certain effects, turning on Graphics stabilization in the configuration. Nothing. Leaving no anti-virus installed, updating to latest drivers, running as Admin on the program. Absolutely nothing fixed it.

He's resorted to installing Windows XP SP3 on a separate partition just to play this game. And, guess what? The graphical issues disappeared.

Now, I play FFXI as well with a Radeon HD 6950 but Windows 8 Pro 64-bit and an ASRock board with Catalyst 12.10 installed. NO graphical issues whatsoever.

So, it really varies from person to person.

Another issue I've come across is with one of the games I play quite often-- Pangya. Now this could be a problem with the developer that's put into the game. But, the game has issues with Windows 7 and Windows 8. Yes, both Windows 7 and 8 can run the game, but it makes the taskbar funky (flickers), Start button disappears (in Windows 7), Skype crashes while the game is running, Steam crashes, and very rarely other programs throws off a random out of memory error on a system with 16GB of RAM installed.

I put the game in Windows XP Pro SP3 installed in a VM and run it through VMWare Workstation. Guess what? No issues whatsover. That game runs absolutely fine as if it's running on another computer and native hardware.

So, when Windows XP is cutoff and if activation is no longer possible, it's going to be a problem to a lot of people who run certain games. Why? These developers refuse to update their games or reprogram them to have better compatibility with newer Windows operating systems.

It's going to be a problem later on when the DirectX versions are revised in each iteration and support for older DirectX versions are either emulated or certain features are deprecated or removed. These games are going to have compatibility issues regardless because of stubborn developers like Square-Enix and a few others. That is something the end-user cannot fix except resorting to older operating system such as Windows XP.
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For your two games you need to disable desktop compilation... also running them as admin might work as well
 
Iv'e been using XP to run an older version of AutoCAD for years. I can keep on running it after EOL because I don't need to connect to the internet.
As far as support with modern hardware it looks like the Z77 chipset is the last to support XP. The new Z87 chip doesn't offer any XP drivers for mobo's.
So if you want to keep running XP after EOL stay with P67, Z68, Z77 or go AMD.
 
People will produce unofficial updates and tweaked drivers for XP just like they have for 2000. I run Firefox 22.0 in Win2k as well as the latest Flash and Java. My guess, XP will be around for a long time.
 
The drawback of using XP after EOL will be the same as the drawbacks of using it right now...You're using an archaic, slow, insecure, poorly supported, less stable, less functional operating system that everybody else wishes would have gone away years ago. If you're okay with that (and I don't know why you ever would be), the end of support is probably meaningless to you anyways.
 
reb00tin said:
People will produce unofficial updates and tweaked drivers for XP just like they have for 2000. I run Firefox 22.0 in Win2k as well as the latest Flash and Java. My guess, XP will be around for a long time.
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Using unofficial updates only creates more security problems than they could ever solve. The creators wouldn't have access to the source code to see how MS wrote the bugged code, nor would they have the tools or dedicated manpower to find, code, test, and validate the fix. They also would have a hard time knowing if anything they changed caused any problems in other code. You're just asking for problems.
 
Dogs said:
The drawback of using XP after EOL will be the same as the drawbacks of using it right now...You're using an archaic, slow, insecure, poorly supported, less stable, less functional operating system that everybody else wishes would have gone away years ago. If you're okay with that (and I don't know why you ever would be), the end of support is probably meaningless to you anyways.
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Old and insecure yes, slow compared to win7? That's hard to swallow.
 
B00nie said:
Old and insecure yes, slow compared to win7? That's hard to swallow.
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I can't imagine why that would be at all hard to swallow. For starters, anybody who has had to use XP and Windows 7 side-by-side on identical machines (I have done a lot of this with both older and newer machines) should know that XP is painfully slow. We might remember XP as seeming fast, but that was because when most of us were using it, it was. Compared to Windows 7, though, it's much slower.

And let's be honest, it makes sense. First off, Windows 7 is how many years newer? A lot has changed since XP first came out. Windows 7 has better processor scheduling, better memory management, a better driver model, a better I/O subsystem, and features like superfetch and indexing. The new driver model, for example, adds a lot of resource management capabilities that allow the UI in Windows 7 (when aero is enabled) to be rendered primarily by the GPU, whereas in XP this mostly done by the CPU. Superfetch caches regularly used files and programs in memory for faster retrieval. We're used to how quickly apps open in Windows 7, but when you go back to XP it takes much longer and it's really painful having to wait for things on a reasonably fast system. Indexing allows you to find files almost immediately. Have you ever used the search in XP? It's slower than soil erosion. Unless the computer in question is below the minimum requirements for Windows 7, 7 will make much better use of the computer's resources and that will result in faster performance.
 
ryan_975 said:
Using unofficial updates only creates more security problems than they could ever solve. The creators wouldn't have access to the source code to see how MS wrote the bugged code, nor would they have the tools or dedicated manpower to find, code, test, and validate the fix. They also would have a hard time knowing if anything they changed caused any problems in other code. You're just asking for problems.
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True, they don’t update the guts of the OS. They teak drivers to support new devices, such as video cards, AHCI, USB 3.0, etc., and add/teak APIs to support the latest Firefox & Thunderbird. I run Windows 2000 Professional on 8-core AMD.
 
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