On Tuesday, Microsoft will send out its latest monthly batch of automated fixes to new problems that have been identified in its software. It’s a routine so well established that it is known as “Patch Tuesday,” but this time will be different. It’s the last time that a fix will be sent for Windows XP.
Despite increasingly urgent warnings since 2008 that the company would stop supporting Windows XP on April 8, 2014, millions of the world’s personal computers still run on the venerable operating system.
With the deadline, Microsoft will not attempt to fix new viruses or security vulnerabilities that might affect computers running XP. The company has virtually admitted that XP, designed in 2001, is such a dinosaur by the standards of modern Internet security that it ought to be extinct.
