If asked what the top selling PC of all time was, most of us would say MacBook Air, or some spiffy new laptop. Would it surprise you to know that it was actually the Commodore 64? It was a sweet ride in its day, but the fragmentation of the PC market and ever-improving standards relegated the trusty Commodore to the technology scrap heap. More recently, another workhorse took a giant step toward irrelevance. The Windows XP operating system became available back in 2001 and sales of PCs with XP preinstalled continued through 2010. Despite the fact that nearly 30% of the world’s users still rely on XP today, Microsoft has made it clear they want XP users to move to Windows 7 or Windows 8, by announcing they are stopping support of XP (want to know exactly when this happens? Check out the XP countdown clock at Microsoft’s site).
The elimination of XP support means a growing number of apps and devices will not work with XP, but more importantly security flaws will develop for XP users. With no Patch Tuesday updates, your XP machine will slowly and inevitably develop cracks the bad guys will exploit. We know our customers rely on us to help keep them safe and secure, and we take that role very, very seriously. While we will continue to update virus definitions (that help identify the bad stuff on computers) for XP, over time the OS itself will become vulnerable. Because of these concerns, we’ve made the decision to support our suite of Windows products on XP through the end of 2014. We will announce our plans for 2015 no later than November 1st.
On another “technology changes” note, our most recent SecureIT/SecureIT Plus updates added a number of new, more robust features. These changes in minimum requirements will often impact XP users first as they are using older machines. Therefore, even though we will support XP as a platform, some of the machines themselves may no longer be capable of running our software. Going forward, customers who want to install SecureIT or SecureIT Plus on their Windows machines must meet at least the following system minimums:
Operating System Support
All Windows 8 Editions
All Windows 7 Editions
All Windows Vista Editions
All Windows XP Editions
Resource Requirements
Processor: Pentium 4 or newer; AMD Athlon or newer
Available Hard Disk Space: 400MB
RAM: 512MB on Windows XP; 1GB On Vista or newer
Administrative Privileges
Broadband or Dial-up Internet connection
We’ll keep you posted on the future of XP for SecurityCoverage products, but encourage our customers to continue to upgrade to stay ahead of the ever changing technical world. As we all know, even the best selling PC of all time can end up on the technology scrap heap…
