It saddens me that the days of windows XP are numbered. It is my favorite operating system that I have ever used, and I’m sure many people will agree with me. However, because Vista is not as much of an upgrade as I had hoped, I have no strong desire to upgrade any time soon. Microsoft plans to put a stop to people like me. As of June 30th, 2008, no company can sell a system with XP installed. As of April 19th, 2009, the mainstream cycle will official end. This means there will be no more licensing, no free help, ect. This makes getting and using the product much harder. But as if that were not enough, the extended phase cycle will end a year later with discontinued software patches, downloads, documentations, or any mentions of the mere existence of the most popular operation system on the planet. So unless you have multiple copies of XP and enough licenses to go around (not to mention service packs, patches, and extensive documentation on disk) you might be forced to switch. Its sad that you don’t really have a choice in the matter of how you would like to compute.
