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Windows XP End Of Life

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Microsoft Life-Cycle Policy: Officially from Microsoft the last date to order Windows XP was January 31, 2009. The last date for suppliers to order product, however, slipped somewhat and it is unclear what the last date to obtain Windows XP will be exactly.

As of January 2010, OEM copies of XP Pro as disappearing from distribution so we estimate we may still be able to ship systems with it for only another few months. After it is gone, we can do extra cost downgrades but systems will NOT include XP Pro media.

So what should you do as a consumer?
...we've got some recommendations.

Windows XP Pro:

Besides purchasing a full OEM CD version with your system, XP Pro may be downgraded from certain versions of Windows Vista or Windows 7, specifically the Business or Ultimate versions. When CD versions of XP Pro run out, we will be offering downgrades for a small extra fee.
If you have not begun migrating to Windows 7, we recommend doing so in 2010 unless legacy applications prevent this -- although XP will continue to be viable for another 4 years, it is now 7+ years old and time to look forward.
Microsoft will officially cease all support of Windows XP in 2014 so there is no immediate need to upgrade existing systems, but we recommend replacing them with Windows 7 systems as they are retired.

Windows 7:

Both Beta and Released products have been well received, it appears to be a smaller, faster, polished version of Windows Vista.
We recommend moving to Windows 7 once supplies of XP Pro run out, if your applications are compatible. There should be few problems of compatibility unless you are using legacy applications.
We recommend migrating to 64-bit Windows 7 unless you still have legacy DOS applications, in which case 32-bit versions will be the necessary choice, or you will need to implement virtualization of some kind to run a copy of XP under Windows 7.
We recommend migrating existing Windows Vista systems to Windows 7 soon after it becomes available, since Windows 7 will become the defacto standard version of Windows and Vista's existance is uncertain once Windows 7 ships.