XP Home Support To End 31/12/2006?

MS has announced that support and security updates will cease from
31/12/2006 for XP Home, support for XP Pro will continue for two years
after the release of Vista. Whether or not they may succumb to pressure
(as they did for W98) remains to be seen.
It seems astonishing to me, this laptop came with XP Home and it means
I will have had less than one year's support for the OS!

The cover date of the magazine (Computer Shopper) is April so I
suspected a hoax but it seems to be confirmed at:

Ponder...

98 has only just been stopped. I think 5 years after release of a newer
OS is the usual date for stopping support IIRC, and as they have a service
pack release planned for sometime in 2007 I seriously doubt it's genuine ;)

Jeff Gaines...

That's been updated (although MS have now 'clarified' the situation).
Home versions of a MS OS are only supported up to the release of the
replacement, Pro versions for 2 years thereafter. That's what cause the
consternation, on MS's own rules support for XP Home would have ceased
towards the end of the year! However, I think it's sunk in at MS and
Faolan posted a link to their update/clarification.

It's a pity I can't find a decent new reader for Linux.

Ponder...

Dialog under vmware ;)

Knode is sort of there but has a few quirks I just can't get on with.

Jeff Gaines...

I decided that running an emulator was cheating :-)

I like KNode but I want an off-line news reader. I use a laptop most of
the time and each time I moved on to the next message it took a finite
time to make all the connections and get th message body.

I also ran leafnode and connected to that from KNode (Pan is quite nice
too). I have a horrible feeling I have got to the stage (or perhaps
it's age) when I just want to turn the machine on and use it. I am
watching Apple's venture into Intel machines closely as well. All good
fun :-)

Anybody else heard anything about this? The lack of security updates
seems to me the real issue, I wonder if XP Pro security updates would
work?

Faolan...

The official 'line' from M$:

Faolan...

Wrong link this is the one:

The first is for licences!

Rabbit...

< me dons my cynic's hat>
Could it possibly be a rumour put about to panic people into buying VISTA ?
You know the type of thing * you don't want to buy a CRT TV/ last year's
model car/ Time computers 'cos if they go wrong there are no spares* type of
thing. You must have had that spiel from some salesman at some time :-)

Mike Tullett...

I cannot believe Microsoft would be so witless as to end support so early.
Given they extended support for 98 until this summer, I'd lay heavy odds
they will extend support for XP home for quite a long time.