[Hidden-tech] State mandates on Windows XP?

Robert Heller heller at deepsoft.com
Wed Apr 2 17:21:46 EDT 2014


At Wed, 02 Apr 2014 15:34:21 -0400 David Korpiewski <davidk at cs.umass.edu> wrote:

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> I work for a non profit that takes state money.  Has anyone heard if the 
> state is going to mandate that anyone with a state contract will be 
> required to get rid of their XP computers?    Or anything else in the 
> pipeline for the state requiring people to move away from XP? Here at 
> umass we have a policy that any XP system after April 8th will become a 
> "vulnerability" and will be banned from being on the network.

Even if the state "does nothing", it would be prudent to 'voluntarily' get rid
of the Windows XP machines. If the *cost* of a replacement MS-Windows machine
is too much, Ubuntu (cost = $0.00) can be installed on the older Windows XP
machines, since it is likely that MS-Windows 7 or 8 won't run on something
that originally shipped with Windows XP -- eg 32-bit processor, short on RAM
and/or hard drive space, etc. Ubuntu (or really any Linux distro) will run
quite happily on older, 32-bit hardware (and a 'bleeding edge' distro like
Ubuntu will have up-to-date versions of LibreOffice, which can deal with
recent vintage mess-word docx files). If there are mess-windows only apps, a
Windows XP system running in a sandboxed VM (eg without Internet access) can
be set up with VirtualBox. Ubuntu 12.04 LTS only needs about 10Gig of disk
space for the O/S files and is happy with run with only 512Meg of RAM
(although at least 1Gig is prefered). CentOS 5 is happy to run on diskless P4
workstations with only 1.25G (1G + 256Meg) of RAM -- we have a pile of P4
Small Form Factor ("Samba") boxes at the Wendell Free Library running network
booted CentOS 5 with their file system NFS mounted.

> 
> Thoughts?
> Thanks
> David
> 
> 
> 

-- 
Robert Heller             -- 978-544-6933 / heller at deepsoft.com
Deepwoods Software        -- http://www.deepsoft.com/
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