With XP being ditched I’m thinking of my options for the future. My wife has a newer laptop, I have a work laptop, we have an old laptop we rarely (read as never) use which I believe is XP (might need to boot it and find out), and I have my tower which is XP and probably destined for the scrap heap in the next couple of years.
I’m trying to decide what direction to head with a replacement since it just doesn’t make sense to upgrade the old tower. I don’t particularly love a laptop and since I have one for work and one in the closet I’m just not leaning toward going that route. I can get a new tower which would meet the needs for a reasonable sum.
I’m frugal so I’m leaning toward keeping the old tower till it dies and then worrying about it. I use Firefox and Chrome with Thunderbird and they will be supported for awhile so I don’t see issues with viruses and malware in my future any more than I see currently.
I know there are plenty of tech savvy folks on the forum, so I’d like to hear your thoughts. I’m not going to change to Linux just to keep an ailing machine, but I can’t see replacing a machine which still functions properly.
You can breath a breath of new life into your old machine(s) by installing a linux distro- particularly a lightweight version such as Lubuntu. You may find performance is better than it was with XP.
Nothing to be intimidated about as the install (all GUI) is certainly easier than windows is/was. I was going to consign my unsupported 08 laptop to the trash-heap but now I’ve got a new zippy OS that gets regular security updates etc…
I asked our IT guy at the office that question about XP as well. His thought was that as long as you had a 3rd party firewall your security should be fine. All of our networked computers at the office run on terminal service and are XP based. He suggested we keep them as is or switch to Linux OS as most software is cloud based any more and the OS is much less important.
Make a full backup of your PC now while it’s in good working order. Then keep using it until you have an absolute need to upgrade (i.e., you need software that doesn’t run on it, hardware craps out on you, actually get a virus that you can’t recover from). There’s no need to replace a computer now because at some point in the future you may need to upgrade.
And Windows has the “every other version” thing going for it, so if you can last until Windows 9, you may be fine. I loved XP, and I’m very happy with Win 7 right now. Hopefully 9 will be worthwhile whenever it drops.
Mint or Ubuntu. The issue of OS replacement is a difficult one–it’s like if you re-installed with Windows 7. Windows has the upgrade path advantage, but you’ve waived that.
But I use Linux because Windows poses too many challenges with finding software, installing software, keeping software working, keeping it up to date, and then the software is just inferior. If you have apps that are specialized (you said Chrome and Thunderbird, I don’t know if that’s a restriction or if that’s just “these are my browser and mail app” statement and you use a bunch of other stuff), you obviously need the OS they run on.
Beyond that, switching to Linux won’t keep an aging machine alive. It eats resources too. Put some more RAM in or swap in an SSD as your root drive sure, $50-$100 and it’s a big return on investment. You’re back to installing Windows over with the SSD (which brings you to the “Maybe Linux” fork, implications above–it’s not likely to lower your resource usage significantly), but it’s a huge upgrade.
Seems to me it is an OS issue not an HW issue. The OP doesn’t really want to make a switch but I’d reiterate that Linux distros are dead simple these days. Agreeably, 6-7 years ago they were about as friendly as win-95 was so there is good reason for trepidation. Nowadays no problem. Everything tends to work- far better than XP ever did.
I’m not interested in upgrading hardware. The computer is slowing over the years and IME that means about two more years it will be heading out the door.
I’m just not feeling changing the OS either. If it was less than a half hour to do EVERYTHING then fine, but somehow I see hours of time spend tweaking, learning, etc. I just don’t want to spend hours when the only consecutive hours I have anymore or on the weekend.
I think I have resolved it to backup and roll with it. When it dies/as it dies, replace.
Many of them have the “live cd/dvd” feature. This loads and runs entirely in the system’s RAM without affecting the existing OS. However if you have less than half a gig of RAM it will be problematic unless it’s a really lightweight distro like Puppy. Puppy linux is usually less than 100mb since it was designed originally to fit on small thumb-drives back when they were expensive and short on memory. Puppy can take some fiddling though but is far more polished than 8 years ago.
If you don’t need top of the line - I bought a refurbished computer off of tiger direct last year. The computer was previously leased and the specs were about 2 years old. I figured this would be plenty. Plenty of juice for average use. It’s a desktop and didn’t come with a monitor. It cost a whole $180. As a bonus, the refurbishing company reformats the hard drive and installs a new, up-to-date copy of Windows - and nothing else! None of the @#$@%$ they normally stuff into a new computer.
