Windows XP and Vista Long Term Support Plan

[Valdis Lapins]

On Fri, Oct 14, 2016 at 11:41:29AM -0400, Peter
Dolanjski wrote:
>
> Based on an upper and lower bound projection,
the end of ESR52 (likely
> April-ish 2018) shows that WinXP should be
between 2.5-4.2% our Firefox
> Average Monthly ADIs.  By January 1st, 2019, the
range is 0.8-2.6% of
> monthly ADIs (though that's trending pretty far
out).
> I think we can say with some certainty that the
worst case scenario (in
> terms of length of support) is the end of 2018.

If I'm not too late to the party, one thing you
may want to consider in your deliberations is this
(from
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/gp/lifewinembed):

"Windows Embedded POSReady 2009. This product for
Point of Sale devices reflects the updates
available in Windows Embedded Standard 2009. It
was originally released on 2009, and *extended
support will end on April 9, 2019*."

Obviously not all still remaining XP users are
using the so-called "POSReady hack" (a simple
one-time registry fix, really) to continue getting
security updates on regular XP, but the numbers
aren't insignificant either. My own anecdotal
evidence suggests that for many people news about
the availability and effortlessness of this method
was *the* deciding factor in their choice to
remain on XP until this support runs out.
Therefore, not taking this date into account and
simply relying on projections may lead to
surprises down the line.

(If at all possible, lets not get into how
enormously "different" POSReady and normal XP are
supposed to be and how "unsupported" and
"problematic" using these updates is. The fact is,
plenty of people are using this method; and the
amount of reported problems has been negligible.)

Valdis