Windows XP

[Neilg]

Everything mentioned in that article is from malware or spam emails. Anti mal/spyware will handle that. teaching your employees to not be complete morons will also handle that.

Being redirected to a page that looks like your bank and despite the URL being www.totallyyourbankforrealipromise.com, still typing in your details and then having your account cleaned out is not hacking. Or receiving an email with a phone number saying 'this is your bank we urgently need you to call us and give us all your details', and blindly diving in to hand over as much personal information as possible is also not hacking.

[dlparisi]

This month's Patch Tuesday is an excellent case in point. Back in November, Microsoft issued a security advisory about a kernel vulnerability that affects both Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. The vulnerability does require a potential attacker to have valid login credentials and "could not be exploited remotely or by anonymous users".

Call me naive, but this sounds like zero vulnerability for me. In order for someone to exploit the security issue they cannot do it remotely and they need a valid login? Sounds reasonably secure to me for architecture work.

[andybot_cg]

Everything mentioned in that article is from malware or spam emails. Anti mal/spyware will handle that. teaching your employees to not be complete morons will also handle that.

Being redirected to a page that looks like your bank and despite the URL being www.totallyyourbankforrealipromise.com, still typing in your details and then having your account cleaned out is not hacking. Or receiving an email with a phone number saying 'this is your bank we urgently need you to call us and give us all your details', and blindly diving in to hand over as much personal information as possible is also not hacking.

Be aware that things like browser exploits (just browsing to a normal website that's been hacked) and email attachments that get through spyware/ malware detection (no AV is 100% effective, far from it) can lead to the computer being owned and used for sending out spam, botnets, etc. See: http://krebsonsecurity.com/2012/10/t...-pc-revisited/

WinXP is a much more vulnerable platform than any other Windows platform (Oh, besides win95, lol) Any computer system that scores of people are using for email and web better be much more secure, the likelihood of someone getting infected with *something* is nearly 100% if you continue with winXP

[kalamazandy]

I'm in agreement here. It's not likely that virus companies will stop supporting XP. That's their biggest client. Win7 and 8 has much less need for it with Defender defaulted on. As an experiment I've been running my web only machine with nothing but defender. I scan it over the network periodically. It's been 4 years, and no problems yet. But I know it's been attacked a few times.

I fully support something like OpenOffice or LibreOffice. I wish we would switch at my office. Unfortunately, I have to deliver designed power point files to clients all the time. Seriously, people hire me at animation consulting rates to make their powerpoint slides. It does Not thrill me, but sometimes you gotta keep big clients happy to keep the animation work coming in. The 3rd party presentation software is just as good, but since I have to test it out on powerpoint and sometimes do complex animations, I just do the whole thing there. Stuff like that pretty much forces us to all use MS Office. Bleh
If you can get away with an open source office you can probably use linux though. Ubuntu is pretty easy. And it's hard enough to switch over that peope that don't know what they are doing have a pretty hard time messing things up unless you're running Wine.

[beestee]

We have been looking into Linux for our office and there are some surprisingly good free CAD tools available for the platform, draftsight in particular is one that we have tested and found to be adequate for many purposes.

[glorybound]

I am thinking Ubuntu with VMWare.

[trixian]

If you want your xp users to comfortably transition into the GNU/Linux universe, I would recommend going for Mint instead of Ubuntu.
Ubuntu can get infuriating some times in regards to gui.

[glorybound]

Thanks, I'll look into Mint.