Microsoft has announced the retirement of Windows XP from Apr-2014.
That month marks the end of my 4th year of anti-predatory adaptive life. Since the news reached me, I have added two new Windows-8 pre-loaded laptops to my homestead. This leaves out my desktop with Windows XP living here since 2010. This is the desktop that has morphed from 1995 into a dual-core pentium running XP-SP3 in 2010. In that time, the total cost came down by 66% and HW-SW-storage capacity rose manifold.
And this comes as no surprise, Microsoft went from Windows 3.1 to 95 to NT to 98 to 2000 to ME, till it got me wondering if it will ever run out of names, to 7 to 8 to 8.1. Intel has gone from 8086 to 80286 to 386 to 486 to pentium to pentium-4 to Dual core to core 2-duo to core i3 to core i5 to core i7.
And MS and Intel together has still not come out with their own anti-predatory adaptive life. They have become their own life-source, and along the way are providing a livelihood for all predatory lifeforms.
This is the machine I am using to write this on. And I now know that it will come under attack from predators. I will have to live with threats of looming danger over my bank account, credit card, demat account, billing and payment portals and my HDD.
Microsoft, as I expected, is going to abandon all its XP users.
This is when I started to look out. At first I wondered if I could in some way use my two copies of Windows 8. I now know that I cannot. I started to look out for cheap upgrade options - there were none. Then I looked for on-line stores that sold Windows-8. I found many, but I baulked at the cost.
I knew linux was free. I just had to make sure I will not miss out on anything that I grew used to. I had worked on UNIX systems for 12 years, and once upon a time, I also had used the dual boot lilo on a previous incarnation of this desktop. I must now set out to explore.
I am determined to live without spending a penny more on my home computers.
