I would like to upgrade my old Thinkpad X60S laptop (winXP) but all the new laptops don't "officially" support XP. I have some software which needs XP.
The X230 looks nice.
Doing the usual searches, I see the usual banal stuff about XP being dead, insecure, not supported, etc, etc, but when one goes to the Lenovo drivers site for the X230 one sees a load of XP drivers.
So Lenovo are hardly dropping XP support!
Maybe some features stop working (the fingerprint reader, perhaps) but that's OK.
Does anybody have any specific experience?
I don't want the VM solution for XP because it is quite untidy. I have it on my Lenovo Tablet 2 tablet and while it works, it isn't a good solution. I use XP all day at work and at home and it does everything I need, whereas win7 is pretty weird in many areas, and win8 is worse (for a laptop).
Maybe have a quick read of this M$ XP Link. It's possible some of the big institutions may still get extended XP support from M$, but in my experience that normally comes at a significant cost, and is not available to home users.
Sure; loads of corporates and an even bigger chunk of industrial (factory floor) users are still on XP.
I am not at all concerned about M$ support or lack of it. It works, after all.
The vulnerability of an XP machine is 100% via the internet, and if behind NAT, it is severely limited to back doors in the apps one is using. If one avoids Outlook, some 90% of the risk is gone, and avoiding IE removes perhaps another 9%.
If a laptop is used by your kids, all bets are off and it's more or less guaranteed to get infected within days if not hours, but for "serious" use, especially mainly for aviation weather etc, I don't see an issue. I have never had any AV software on laptops (10 years or more) and never got anything.
What concerns me is driver support. Normally, when you put XP on a new laptop, some bits won't be supported with drivers e.g. the 3G radio, bluetooth, webcam, etc.
I agree with most of what you say, though I would personally have AV because one website can lead to another (or be hacked) and who knows what might be scripted.
Particuarly when XP first came out, and on laptops, I recall numerous issues doing a fresh install of an OS, and having to hunt high and low to get various device drivers (PCMCIA - included) working properly. I guess what you need to do is see what components are on the motherboard for the Lenovo laptop and check that most or all device drivers are there for XP and download them now. Before Windows Update is canned for XP, there may be some generic drivers it will find. I''d hazard a guess that your more traditional laptops (IBM/Lenovo, Dell, HP) will have fairly easy to come by drivers.
I am personally aware of one organisation that has 70,000 odd XP machines still in use, and wont have Windows 7 until near the end of 2014. You should be ok......
Virtualise your app with the xp environment but go for win8.
The joy of booting fast is a big wow
