Probably a short one today.

There are still a large number of people who are still, somehow, convinced that XP is the best Windows Version ever released in the history of the universe. In their latest set of battles against being forced by “evil Microsoft” to not use an OS that is from 2001, they have found a registry key that can be changed to allow Windows XP to receive updates for the POSReady version.

My first thought when reading this was whether anybody actually looked into what those updates contain. POSReady is used in far different environments and the update software it receives is not typically the same sort of consumer-level security fixes. Some of them may apply- others may not. But the fact is that the updates will not be being installed on the system they expect to be. The update system has been separate for the two products since they were introduced, and that isn’t simply so they can drop support for one and keep supporting the other.

The entire XP die-hardness would be comical if it wasn’t also so terribly tragic. Most such XP users have basically ‘threatened’ that if Microsoft dropped support for XP they would move to Linux. You may as well threaten to stop visiting a store if they don’t give you everything for free.

For older systems? Yes, you should move away from Windows XP. If the system is not powerful enough to run Windows 7 or 8, than you would be wise to select a Linux distribution as an alternative, IMO. (Though if you cannot run 7/8 the latest distributions might give you trouble too). Threatening to run Linux is almost a veiled insult against the viability of Linux distributions, if you think about it, because it is basically saying “I would prefer to run a version of Windows from 13 years ago rather than the latest version of an alternative”. How bad would that alternative have to be to deserve that sort of insult?