Continuing with XP

[IainB]

...as the day of end-of-support for XP draws near, I am searching for a solution for my wife who staunchly refuses to leave her well-tuned XP behind. (For her, even the thought of going to W7 raises major fears of having to face the learning curve)...
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-chrisk (February 06, 2014, 06:00 AM)

I just asked my now 12 y/o daughter how she coped with the switch from XP to Win7-64 Home Premium 2½ years ago, and what felt difficult about it.

Background:

• We had to make the switch because her monster DELL gamer laptop - which had a very fast/powerful graphics display and which I was originally given secondhand and dead (it's display card had failed), had suffered a failed display again, after putting in some 3+ years of good service.
  
  
• We switched to a new, refurbished (half-price) DELL laptop with an Intel i5 CPU and 1-year DELL warranty, running Win7-64 Home Premium.
  

Her reply:

Nothing felt much different, no difficulties really. The old laptop was much heavier - which was never a problem - and had a bigger screen. The new one is lighter and felt like the old one but for its smaller screen, and it could run the browser and Word and my SIMS just like before, but the new laptop is much slower in SIMS and has long waits so I have had to get used to that.
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I should explain that both laptops had been carefully configured by me with a standard desktop build, with the newer one having the same look-and-feel as the old one, same folders, and everything set up so that my daughter could use it with minimal trouble/difference. By the way, she has always had the Taskbar (in XP and Win7) set up like this

[wraith808]

You know, even if she stays on XP, on the hardware she is currently using or a VM, there is going to be a learning curve involved.

-app103 (February 06, 2014, 11:52 PM)

Nicely put App!  And great points!

[TaoPhoenix]

For me a lot of little finesse details felt different, especially the stuff in what is XP's "Right click desktop/properties". A few of my more obscure programs misbehaved a little. (See a couple of my notes to Skwire last year.)

Otherwise my decision point is more price and hassle based rather than the "OhMyGawd get that Poison Ivy that is Win8 away from me!"

[mikiem]

Shades is right. You can fairly easily turn an existing copy of XP, including software, into a VM -- Paragon & Microsoft both have tools -- but to say it can be sluggish as a VM would be a gross understatement. Installing XP fresh is only a bit better. Running the modified version of XP that Microsoft uses for win7's XP mode helps a lot, but it's still way underpowered from the real thing. On that netbook I doubt it would even run well enough to consider it useable.

cranioscopical is also right -- move directly to 8.1. Why? Microsoft is trying to get 8.1 to run on just about anything more powerful than a calculator. You can for example run off a wim rather than have the full, expanded file setup -- that was developed just because of situation's like your wife's netbook with little storage. 8.1 also has better memory use/handling than win7, which you're going to need.

That said, perhaps the best solution would be none at all -- XP will still work without the monthly patches. Second to that, rumor has it that in the future Microsoft will have their own version of the Chromebook -- basically low powered hardware that runs software on a server.