At Wed, 02 Apr 2014 15:34:21 -0400 David Korpiewski <davidk at cs.umass.edu> wrote: > > MIME-Version: 1.0 > > ** Be sure to fill out the survey/skills inventory in the member's area. > ** If you did, we all thank you. > > > > > > 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/ () ascii ribbon campaign -- against html e-mail /\ www.asciiribbon.org -- against proprietary attachments