Hello
and welcome to another episode of the iBookGuy.
Today we're going to be talking about whether or not Windows XP is obsolete.
Now we've done this before with a lot of Mac products and operating systems.
But I thought I would show you something a little more interesting this time.
I want to start with this computer right here.
This is a Tandy Model 102 and it was made in 1986.
But it runs a Microsoft operating system.
In fact, let me write a little program here for you in Microsoft Basic.
There, what do you think about that?
Now.
Is this computer obsolete?
I mean, of course it is.
Anybody knows this computer is obsolete and its not that it doesn't do everything that
it was designed to do.
It still does all of those things just fine.
The problem is, as a society we've moved forward and we now require more from our computers
than what our computers did for us back in 1986.
So, I thought well, what would be an example of something that's really old and not obsolete.
Now, I walked around my house and I tried to find the oldest piece of technology that
I could find that I still use.
And I only really found one thing.
And it's right here.
So this is a Glock 19.
I actually bought this twenty years ago.
ANd it still works just fine but beyond just working, it actually does everything I need
a pistol to do in the year 2014.
I could have either shown you this.
THere was only one other thing I could possibly show you that you could classify as technology.
Here it is.
Yeah, that's about 20 years old too and it still works just fine.
OK, so how do we find out if Windows XP is obsolete?
Now if you remember the last episode on OS 10.4 Tiger, one of the things I kind of discovered
in my testing is that the operating system itself is not obsolete but because it's no
longer supported by any of the programs that you'd want to run on it, it makes it obsolete
in practice.
So let's find out if Windows XP has the same problem.
OK, so what about Microsoft's number one selling application?
Microsoft Office.
Well, it turns out Office 2013 is no longer supported on Windows XP.
However, you can run Office 2010, which is not that old.
In fact the company I work for 90% of our computers are still running Office 2007.
So, I don't think that's a huge problem, but it will be a huge problem eventually.
On the other hand, if you're the type of person that likes to run the Openoffice.org, the
latest version will still run on XP.
What about your most important application, the web browser?
Well, it turns out the latest version of Internet Explorer which is 10 or 11 potentially, does
not work.
You have to go all the way back to Internet Explorer 8 which came out in March 2009, that's
several years old.
However, If you don't care about running Internet Explorer, you've got two other really good
browsers.
You can run the latest version of Chrome or the latest version of Firefox on Windows XP,
fully supported.
If you need Adobe Flash, which unfortunately most people still need that, the latest version
of Flash player 11 still works on XP as well.
So, really, browsing the web on Chrome or Firefox is fully up to date should be no problem.
Another popular application is photoshop.
Now, I discovered that absolute latest version photpshop cc does not run and you have to
have Windows 7.
But if you go back to Adobe Photoshop CS6 the latest version that will work is from
may 2012, which is you know about a year and a half old.
So you can still run a fairly up to date photoshop on XP.
Let's look at some other applications.
Another popular application is VLC player.
And the latest version VLC is 2.1.2 and it will run on Windows XP.
Another popular program for virtualization is virtualbox.
The latest version, version 4.3.6 will still run on XP with no problems.
Speaking of virtualbox, Ijust wanted to let you guys know I am actually running my tests
of Windows XP as a guest operating system inside of Virtualbox.
Now, that's important to know because even though I'm able to say that all of this software
will work on XP, one of the problems that you'll encounter if you try to use Windows
XP on a brand-new computer is that it's going to be very difficult and in many cases impossible
to find a appropriate drivers to get it working.
So you may be able to install XP on your brand new computer, but you may not be able to find
a video driver or you know a network card driver or something like that.
If you do you're not going to get it from the computer manufacturer.
You're going to have to hunt around for the actual chip manufacturers and try to get it.
But, I'm going to kind of go ahead and say it's not quite obsolete just yet.
Microsoft, in fact even still supports it to this day.
It still receives security updates.
That's not going to last much longer.
I don't remember exactly when the cutoff date is, but I think it's just a few months from
now.
So at that point there will no longer be security updates for Windows XP.
But it really is, it is truly amazing that the operating system has lasted this long
and it's pretty impressive.
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the episode.
I'll see you next time, and hopefully we'll be talking about OS 10.5 leopard.