April 8th: The End of Windows XP

Heads up! Microsoft is officially ending support for Windows XP this coming April 8th. This means XP will be an unsupported operating system without any future security updates.

I’m sort of sad to see it go. XP came out around the same time I entered the software development industry 13 years ago. To put 13 years in perspective, I was using this cell phone in 2001:



Back then, you could drop your cell phone and it wouldn’t shatter if it hit the pavement. My how things have changed:

[caption id="attachment_7009" align="alignnone" width="148"] James Menezes iPhone 5[/caption]

But, along with change comes better performance. XP was stuck with Internet Explorer 8, which was half as fast as IE 9. IE 9 is 20% slower than IE 10. IE 10 is 10% slower than IE 11. Any modern browser from a modern Windows operating system makes IE 8 look like our cell phone comparison above. It is time to update.

Your choices updating are between two versions of Windows, 7 or 8/8.1. If you can still find Windows 7, then great. If not, Windows 8/8.1 is a very solid OS.

Either choice is going to give you an amazing boost in Altru performance. So, mark April 8^th on your calendar and make sure IT people are aware and have plans to get you on a supported browser before that date.