Windows is dead. Long live Windows.

Three weeks ago, I wrote about the impending death of Windows XP, arguably the best version of Windows we have seen yet. Well, today is the day that Microsoft pulls the plug on XP. Here is Microsoft's official announcement.

(I'm writing this on a Windows 7 computer. Windows 7 is a worthy successor to XP, and in many ways it improves on the XP, ahem, experience. But if Windows 7 is so good, then why does it have a "compatibility mode" to enable it to run WinXP programs, and why did / does Microsoft have an official "downgrade path" for those who wished / wish to downgrade from Win7 to XP? Yeah. That's right.)

No matter how much you loved WinXP and want to keep it, it is now vital - critical - for you to switch to a modern operating system. With the end of official support, WinXP will become increasingly vulnerable to hacks and malicious programming. You need to protect yourself by switching to Windows 7, Windows 8, Mac OS X, or a recent flavor of Linux.

It's always tough to see an old workhorse retired, especially when there's so much work left in it. Windows XP wasn't perfect, and it was plagued with security holes its entire life, but it was the best operating system Microsoft came out with - better than any Windows OS before it, and better than any Windows OS that came after it for almost ten years. We bid Windows XP a fond farewell, and we park it next to the Big Boy locomotive, the Willys Jeep, the A-10 Warthog and so many other inventions that went obsolete long before they wore out or stopped being useful.

EDITED TO ADD, EIGHT YEARS LATER, in case anybody didn't get the subtle joke in the second paragraph: Microsoft originally said that "XP" stood for "experience".

Why people don't want to stop using Windows XP

Windows XP, arguably the best Windows OS that Microsoft ever created, is scheduled to die on April 8, 2014. Oh, the OS will continue to work just fine, but that's the date when Microsoft will stop supporting it or issuing security updates and patches for it. After April 8, if you want to use Windows XP, you're on your own.

Yet people won't stop using XP. (Remarkably, most ATMs in the world run on Windows XP, even with three weeks remaining before the end-of-support date.) Why not? Because it works.

Not only does it work, but it has proven over the years, from its inception in 2001 until now, that it is a healthy, robust, easy-to-use version of Windows. It is such a good operating system that Windows Vista was unable to unseat it in 2007. Windows 7, released in 2012, was more an apology for the bloated, sluggish, dead-out-of-the-box Vista than it was a replacement for Windows XP, and it did not surpass XP in market share until August 2012 (according to Wikipedia). The only reason Win7 got any market share from XP was that Microsoft stopped shipping XP. After June 30, 2008. if you wanted to get an XP license, you had to buy one on eBay or Amazon. The latest version of Windows, known as Windows 8, has been received almost as poorly as Vista was.

XP has proven so robust and so popular that Microsoft has had to provide "downgrade paths" and "compatibility modes" for Win7 and Win8 users who wanted to revert to XP.

Some critics, Microsoft included, will say that Win7 and Win8 have a greatly improved feature set over XP. Well, so did Vista, and nobody wanted Vista.

They will also tell you that XP is riddled with security holes - not to mention regular old bugs. Well, so is every version of Windows that has come after XP.

The Linux heads will tout the superiority of Linux over any version of Windows. That's a religious debate that I don't want to get into here. But the pervasiveness of the Windows OS, in any flavor, is undeniable. And XP is the best OS that Microsoft has come up with yet.

Note: This post was written on a Windows 7 computer.

Cleaning up your (non-Mac) PC

I'm rebuilding my sweet wife's computer's hard disk today. We tried all the other solutions to speed up her PC, and none of them restored it to its original speed. Two of the tools that I had put on her computer before the rebuild were CCleaner and Registry Booster, tools that do a really good (but obviously not good enough) job of cleaning all the junk that accumulates, like electronic grit, in the machinery of a Windows computer.

After the rebuild I went to the Internet to download a new copy of Registry Booster for her, and I found an interesting discussion that went something like this. Each entry is from a different player:

"Why does PC World even recommend Registry Booster? When you go to the Registry Booster website, they offer a free scan of your PC, and then they tell you that you have 354 problems with your registry but they won't correct them for you unless you buy the full version of RB. That's not fair!"

"Yeah, that's called scareware." (No smiley.)

"What a rip-off."

"All registry cleaners are rip-offs."

"I don't know why nobody uses the free, web-based registry cleaner from Microsoft. It's at http://onecare.live.com/site/en-us/center/cleanup.htm ."

"Nobody uses it because nobody knows about it, you moron. But thanks for telling us about it. Now I'm gonna start using it."

"Hey everybody, i just found out that you have to run it from IE 7 or IE 8. And it temporarily installs an Active X control on your computer, but it deletes it later."

I just tried it. It displays an EULA that you have to accept, then it downloads a couple of things to your computer, runs a bunch of tests, does the cleanup, and then the last step is "Uploading information to Microsoft." Yikes. I should have read the EULA better before I ran it. Oh, well. The Internet's collective opinion is that it works as well as Registry Booster but it doesn't cost any money. It does require you to become more dependent on Microsoft, though. If that's a price you're willing to pay, then go ahead and try it on your own computer.

Registry Booster is available from http://www.uniblue.com/.

CCleaner is available from http://www.filehippo.com/download_ccleaner.

Once again, the Microsoft tool is available from http://onecare.live.com/site/en-us/center/cleanup.htm, and it only runs under Internet Explorer 7 or 8.

These tools work for Windows XP, Vista and 7.