Malik wrote:

5. How much of the paranoia is the truth anyway? By Microsoft's warning, it's as though all the hackers are ready to pounce one on top of the other on XP systems, once MS pulls out the plug on XP. 🤣

Think about it. Software gets patched for *known* vulnerabilities, since if they're unknown, how can they patch them? Right?

So imagine you've discovered a vulnerability in your favourite popular OS, and you just happen to be planning to take advantage of this vulnerability for your own gain. Wouldn't you wait until after the vendor stops fixing vulnerabilities? That way, rather than having a few week window to exploit that vulnerability before it's fixed, you can exploit it with impunity forever.

Malik wrote:

Or I think I can keep it connected 24/7 and avoid doing bank transactions, online purchasing, saving any sort of passwords or personal information at all in this system. That means, no Vogons logging in from this machine too. 🤣

(But then again, I don't keep my Win95c system connected anymore.)

Not all exploits are about stealing information. Sometimes they are used to join the computer to a botnet for distributed denial of service attacks or spam generation. Better to keep it disconnected all together.

1. i don't even have an antivirus installed, since i use it for gaming mostly and occassionally go online for steam updates. i don't keep any sensitive data anyway in my retro pc and never had any problem till now. if at the worst when the system crashes, i can always format and reinstall.
2. xp is not my main os, so no comments.
3. no idea, but i think the antivirus guys will stop because of unneccessary resource wastage though there may be exceptions.
4. no problem as mentioned in point 1, as the chances of home pc's being targeted are very less afaik.
5. maybe it's true but on corporate side.

I'd suspect there will be an unofficial service pack made for XP, at least the English versions and possibly a couple of the major other languages.
I'm not sure about unknown fixes, but I never even considered this. Good thinking.

At any rate, I'm waiting for the last updates to finally arrive so I can download the latest Dutch XP updates (I already started downloading updates over a year ago...just in case). But I'm not sure how to go about this.

I've read mixed things about Windows Update and finding and downloading the XP updates manually is sorta a pain and takes hours (I'm open for better suggestions. Best would be to be able to download all of them at once, of course without installing them).

Malik wrote:

Not many are willing to let go off Windows XP completely after the D-Day for XP in April this year.

Did you get the memo?

I've found that XP behaves much better when it's not allowed online, so my XP machine lost its Internet privileges years ago.

What I'm more worried about (and I think I expressed this in another thread) is what's going to happen to the activation system. Is it still going to be a one-click online thing? Is the 120 day waiting period still going to apply? Am I going to have to call Mumbai every time from now on? A more reasonable company might release an automatic activation patch, but I doubt that Microsoft would do anything of the sort.

Breaking the activation system would sure be a good way to force less tech-savvy users to "upgrade."

The same questions were discussed here earlier:
WinXP and Office XP/2003 Updates after April 2014

maximus wrote:

I've found that XP behaves much better when it's not allowed online, so my XP machine lost its Internet privileges years ago.

What I'm more worried about (and I think I expressed this in another thread) is what's going to happen to the activation system. Is it still going to be a one-click online thing? Is the 120 day waiting period still going to apply? Am I going to have to call Mumbai every time from now on? A more reasonable company might release an automatic activation patch, but I doubt that Microsoft would do anything of the sort.

*cough* VLK *cough*

NJRoadfan wrote:

*cough* VLK *cough*

I don't see how that would help if the activation servers are down. At the moment, though, it seems that any key, OEM or retail, will work as long as it hasn't been used in the past 120 days.

maximus wrote:

NJRoadfan wrote:

*cough* VLK *cough*

I don't see how that would help if the activation servers are down. At the moment, though, it seems that any key, OEM or retail, will work as long as it hasn't been used in the past 120 days.

VLK copies don't need activation, but the only way to legally obtain VLK copies of Windows is to enter into a Software Assurance agreement, so it's a moot point.

The activation issue for XP was solved long ago as long as you don't mind unofficial fixes.

As for patching new vulnerabilties it's possible that someone make look into porting the 2003 patches to XP in the same fashion that has been done with porting from XP to 2000 by WildBill and BlackWingCat

http://www.windows2000.tk/index.html
http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/146529-pe-too … eating-patches/

Of course 2003 is EOL July 2015. After that it will likely be alot harder to port updates to XP/2003 from Vista/2008/7/2008R2.

If you're using XP to run certain games, you should be able to run it in something like Virtualbox with no problem. And hell no I would not keep it on the internet. So either run it in a vm in some other host OS that is actively being patched, or run it standalone but don't connect to the net. At least that is what I'm doing.

DosFreak wrote:

as long as you don't mind unofficial fixes

Unofficial fixes are nice, but not ideal. Doing things the "legitimate" way is often the best way to avoid technical problems, in my experience. (Compare playing commercial DVDs on Linux using libdvdcss2 to playing them on dedicated DVD or Blu-ray players. )

For myself i thinking of continuing using XP.. But iam not really out of this because of those security issues.. Bank accounting iam doing only on my main computer with windows 7 installed.
Iam only want to playing games with it actually, not other risk full things actually. Maybe there is a good way to tackle to most important xp bugs..
I thougt that the zero day hack could be tackled at some point to install to latest acrobat PDF reader.. Maybe its also a good point not to use the administrator panal as main panel. but make also a seperate user account.

I'm sure I'll have XP around and connected for a long time to come. That said it won't be my main OS and I won't really do any web browsing on it but either way if there is a problem I'll just reimage the box and all fixed!

I mean if I am looking for something quickly I'm perfectly fine with going online on NT4 or 98SE as well, rendering looks a bit funny now in opera 10.60 though.

I'll definitely keep XP going, though strictly off-line and for gaming only. 32-bit Pro SP2 is what I have running in my most modern era retro rig right now. I'll just need to find a reliable activation hack for future re-installs...

awergh wrote:

I'm sure I'll have XP around and connected for a long time to come. That said it won't be my main OS and I won't really do any web browsing on it but either way if there is a problem I'll just reimage the box and all fixed!

I mean if I am looking for something quickly I'm perfectly fine with going online on NT4 or 98SE as well, rendering looks a bit funny now in opera 10.60 though.

Potential solution but needs some work:
http://www.os2museum.com/wp/?p=2282

DosFreak wrote:

awergh wrote:

I'm sure I'll have XP around and connected for a long time to come. That said it won't be my main OS and I won't really do any web browsing on it but either way if there is a problem I'll just reimage the box and all fixed!

I mean if I am looking for something quickly I'm perfectly fine with going online on NT4 or 98SE as well, rendering looks a bit funny now in opera 10.60 though.

Potential solution but needs some work:
http://www.os2museum.com/wp/?p=2282

Haha! That's insanely cool!

I might bring in a view from a different angle here. I'm from Russia, the land of digital piracy, and most part of pirated operating systems have to run with automatic updates OFF. We still have XP SP2 in a lot of places, which was NEVER updated since the introduction of SP2. At home I daily use the release version of Windows 7.

If we do not face much trouble here in Russia, why would anyone?

You don't have the equivalent of the BSA/RIAA mafia over there 😀
For those not familiar with these organizations: BSA = Business Software Alliance, RIAA = Recording Industry Association of America.
I don't think the BSA busts anyone but businesses running pirated copies, but the RIAA has come down hard on little old grandmothers for pirating MP3s. As we seem to be implementing a police state in the US we may need to be a little more careful than those of you overseas.