Windows XP end-of-life migration guide

http://www.zdnet.com/windows-xp-end-of-life-migration-guide-7000023800/

by hepha1979 • 13 years ago

35 49 13 years ago

wil4215• 13 years ago

Thank god. There are still people in my office using XP and IE 6/7 that I wonder why they cant do or see certain things.

pc86• 13 years ago

I can understand being on Windows XP (even though it’s still ridiculous) but what possible reason is there not to upgrade to IE8?

VLM4• 13 years ago

There should be a FAQ; business critical process is only supported when accessed with IE6, regulatory/licensing limits you to a certified configuration which specifically demands IE6, etc.

wil4215• 13 years ago

Either the user refuses to upgrade or the higher ups determine its more cost effective to use IE6 instead of upgrading the Application itself.

oneeyedpigeon• 13 years ago

XP supports up to IE8; why on earth haven't they (been) upgraded?

protomyth2• 13 years ago

I would imagine someone went a bit wild on the ActiveX components in IE and needs them for their custom apps to work.

wil4215• 13 years ago

We have lots of people in the field doing service related work all over the world and they do not take the time to upgrade (or do their job but thats another story). Its takes 2-3 months just to get the old computer back after we send then a brand new computer.

mdisraeli• 13 years ago

Web apps that only officially support older versions of IE. In some cases, blocking entirely other browsers even if they would work. And even when they don't, the vendor only officially supports certain browsers and rejects any incidents logged using other ones.

The exact same thing is a key reason why XP has remained in use for so long.

TillE• 13 years ago

This is what VMs are for. If you really really absolutely must run one piece of ancient software, it doesn't need to hold back everything else you do.

wil4215• 13 years ago

I have even seen old webapps that are handled better with newer browsers be restriced to the old versions of IE because of "security reasons."

salient• 13 years ago

With XP finally at the end of life, this is a great opportunity for many companies or institutions to switch to Linux.

jzwinck• 13 years ago

I'm all for Linux, but this won't happen. The people who leave XP due to running out of paid support options will find no comfort in Linux. Commercial support is too fragmented and not as discoverable as on Windows. People who do not care will stay on XP still. Companies will upgrade to Windows 8, or perhaps 7. I don't see a big demographic switching to Linux right now.

VLM4• 13 years ago

"The people who leave XP due to running out of paid support options will find no comfort in Linux."

I can't be bothered to post links to every distro and every consultant on the planet, but just for laughs:

http://www.debian.org/consultants/

And this is just independents (mostly) and just Debian. I'm sure IBM and other major corps would be glad to help as long as its legal, which is not an issue with FOSS unlike windows.

Now if MS opensourced windows XP as part of the abandonment, that might be interesting.

zanny2• 13 years ago

Commercial support is too fragmented and not as discoverable as on Windows.

Ubuntu, Suse, and RHEL are commercial support. Novel, Canonical, and Red Hat make good chunks of profits from support contracts. They have a business model at all because of businesses that adopt them and pay for support, and Red Hat is a billion dollar business!

Note most of that support is server side, but I know all 3 offer some variant of standard desktop support as well. So do a lot of Ubuntu PC vendors like system76.

prawks• 13 years ago

You're also forgetting re-training thousands of employees on an entirely new operating system. That's far more of an issue than commercial support at this point (as the argumentors responding to you have pointed out).

Even though Unity and other desktop environments are quite intuitive at this point, changing over would cause a massive disruption to laymen who have been using a Start menu, Windows Explorer, and Outlook for years.

The benefits of switching (license costs, I suppose) far, far outweigh the benefits.

VLM4• 13 years ago

Or macs, or one of a zillion tablets.

The most entertaining part to watch is psuedo-embedded devices. All you need to do to upgrade, is throw out an entire $10M MRI machine and buy another. Yes your steam boiler is OK but the monitoring system runs XP and we don't sell upgrade kits of just a new monitoring system, although we could make you a deal on a completely new steam boiler system. Or a (in)security system, a HVAC system that runs independently but can only be reprogrammed using some weird XP only driver and software, or a zillion other PC assisted technologies.

mkesper2• 13 years ago

That one probably runs Windows XP "Embedded" which will die about two years later than normal XP: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsembedded/en-us/product-lifec...

stusmall• 13 years ago

The kind of company that is still on XP and is switching because it is EOL isn't the kind of company who will be switching to Linux any time soon.

y0ghur7_xxx• 13 years ago

According to Microsoft, a full operating system migration can take up to six months

Well, we have to migrate about 6000 pcs, and it's a 1 and ½ years project. Much more than six moths.

mkesper2• 13 years ago

So why did you start so late / why does it take so long?

___1___• 13 years ago

Because XP probably does everything they need and the upgrade will be reluctant.

rubberband• 13 years ago

A lot of businesses I talk to have a lot of legacy applications which work well under XP, but break for whatever esoteric reason (for example, an old Access database, or VB6 app) under Windows 7/8. An equally large pain the ass is a ton of intranet sites break when switching to IE9 and above (heck, a lot of companies still force IE6/7 and below with Group Policy). It's difficult to make a case to management when everything is working well (it's hard to explain the nuances of "end of support life cycle" to someone who needs help "getting to the Google").

Also, there are a fair number of desktop software products which don't even support Windows 8 yet. Hard as it may seem for the crowd here, most of the software world is not on the HTML5/Ruby/OMGMVCJAVASCRIPTBRO bandwagon yet.

protomyth2• 13 years ago

Making sure all the software and custom apps work with conversion of those that don't takes a fair amount of time in a big organization. I remember one place going from NT 3.51 to NT 4.0 and all the fun of the "new interface" back then.

markolschesky• 13 years ago

I have a Windows XP VM on my computer that runs my client connection to a piece of essential hospital software. It cannot be run on a machine that has .NET 3.5.1 and > 4.0 installed simultaneously, or it throws assembly compatibility errors. The ActiveX components seemingly only work in IE8, not even IE9 in compatibility mode. The vendor will probably only fix this compatibility problem when the piece of software has even less support than VB6 (i.e., virtually none). Because healthcare.

Aardwolf• 13 years ago

"Windows 7 or 8?"

By the time they've made that decision, Windows 9 may be out :)

teddyh• 13 years ago

The big thing about the end of XP is the non-support of SNI (server name indication) in TLS (SSL) in any version of IE on XP.

protonfish• 13 years ago

Wow. The best reason to upgrade is to remove the version lock on the default browser. Not sure what all that says about Microsoft and the current state of technology, but it is weird and sad.

zanny2• 13 years ago

I don't get this, though. The default browser before IE10 was awful, so you shouldn't use it anyway.

It isn't my fault you have incompetent higher ups that seem to trust MS with their lives but won't even consider Google or Mozilla.

dspillett3• 13 years ago

It isn't so much a reason to upgrade as a benefit for devs and server admins to be thankful users are upgrading. It means we can start considering SNI for significant deployments. SNI has worked since IE7 if used on Vista or later.

The best reason to upgrade is that as of April next year XP is no longer going to get security updates unless when a problem is found you pay MS to release a fix for it.

Our major clients (two of the largest investment banks in the country) have recently moved to IE8 on XP and will soon be moving to IE8 on Win7. They will be keeping IE8 as they have a lot of legacy code that they don't want to spend time/money testing (and fixing as needed) against browsers (including IE9+) that don't share all "classic IE"'s bugs upon which some code may be accidentally dependent. See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17671383/ for an example where newer IE has trouble with code that worked in older versions - there are examples that don't involve ActiveX too so even if ActiveX isn't an issue (it is for some of our client's legacy "intranet" apps) you could hit problems like this.

The only reason they finally moved off IE6 is that is soon drops out of any support window even for security updates (this is the main reason they will soon be moving off XP too, the other biggie here being new hardware increasingly not having drivers available that work with XP). Win7 and IE8 leave their final extended support window in 2020 IIRC so we'll be stuck supporting IE8 for some time, but we can at least consider using SNI once we know they've dropped XP on their standard machine builds.

Of course anything that targets mobile people might still not be able to consider SNI even once XP is long enough buried, as some mobile browsers won't play ball. There are still a lot of Android 2.x devices out there and the stock browsers on those won't like it for a start.

mikegioia• 13 years ago

Seriously. I was scratching my head for 2 days (!) trying to figure our why some users on IE8 couldn't access our CDN. Turns out it was this SNI issue that I had no clue existed.

We had to create a separate machine as a CDN load balancer specifically to handle XP.

eleitl2• 13 years ago

If you're migrating off XP you should equally consider migrating to Linux.

mhurron• 13 years ago

Yes, because it's not like any of the applications you use on XP will work on Windows 7 or 8.

And Exchange support is so wonderful on Linux apps. And Active Directory, that's just a walk in the park.

herf• 13 years ago

Microsoft made it way too hard to upgrade out of XP (unless you updated through Vista.) It is no wonder everyone is still on XP.

It would light the PC industry on fire if they made it one click to move your stuff to another machine.

You can buy a new Mac every year and only wait a few hours to move everything, but on Windows it takes months.

raesene3• 13 years ago

That could be a bit of an apples to oranges comparison. From what I've seen the migration time for large corporate XP deployments has little to do with the OS upgrade itself and everything to do with the application support issues.

I was at a meeting recently where people were still saying that they had applications which would only run on XP, which was why they hadn't upgraded.

The problem for corporates now is likely that they won't/can't complete an upgrade before the deadline and the risks of having unsupported XP are unknown. One theory is that a lot of potential attacker will be holding any XP exploits they have at the moment with the intent to use them after the end of support, when there will likely be no patch.

girvo• 13 years ago

No. Going to new Apple releases has the same problem: app compatibility, and OS X doesn't support stuff going back to the 90's, either. And that's just for small personal apps on my iMac, let alone bespoke applications on windows that the Enterprise rely on.

vdm• 13 years ago

1. Switch to an app with a backend that can talk to a tablet and a browser.

CapitalistCartr• 13 years ago

Not everyone is using software in a standard office environment. I have a CNC machine running Windows NT 4. Its a production machine; I need it running, period. I have another running Windows 2000; its a tooling machine, also essential. I have PCs running various CAD and CAM programs which cost 5 figures, and are not negotiable; I simply need them at all times. I need my server of all our past work available at all times; I need the network to be equally available. I can't afford the disruption of trying to get all this running on a new OS because Microsoft thinks I have nothing better to do. I have product to get out the door.

Windows XP end-of-life migration guide

Related Stories