Homeless in Vancouver: Microsoft turns XP zero-day into payday

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      There may be some people on Earth who still don’t know this—lost tribes and people in long-term comas—but today is zero-day for Windows XP users.

      Microsoft says on April 8, it will stop automatically supplying free security updates and virus definitions over the Internet to any installation of Windows XP.

      “Free” being the operative word.

      Yesterday morning, the Guardian newspaper reported that Microsoft has been paid £5.5 million by the U.K. government to continue supplying Windows XP security updates past tomorrow’s deadline to all U.K. public-sector computers.

      The Dutch government has also reportedly made a similar deal with the American software giant, and Bloomberg News has reported that U.S. investment bankers JP Morgan have bought a one-year extension of XP support.

      It is believed and expected that Microsoft is doing a land-office business selling last-minute support extensions to enterprise customers around the world.

      Buying a little more time

      What the U.K. is known to have bought is a year’s worth of security-software updates for Windows XP, Office 2003, and Exchange 2003.

      September 2013 estimate suggested that eight in 10 desktop computers in the U.K. National Health Service (NHS) alone were still running on XP.

      So of 800,000 NHS PCs, 85 percent were running XP, 14 percent were on Windows 7, and one percent on Windows 8.

      Anyone who is going to continue running XP is probably safe as houses if they purchase a real antivirus program or if they at least have the free Microsoft Security Essentials before April 8.

      Microsoft has said for a while now that it will continue to automatically update virus protection for Windows XP through its Security Essentials application until July 14, 2015.

      Hey Microsoft, my cheque may or may not be in the mail

      A few weeks ago a friend asked me to help him move. I hate lifting boxes but of course I said yes. He’s a friend and, after all, they were only mailboxes.

      He wanted to retire his Windows XP desktop PC and we determined the most important thing to keep was his mail.

      The goal was to move the mail from Outlook Express on the XP box into Windows Live Mail (WLM) on his Windows 7 laptop. How hard could that be?

      Microsoft has a free program called Windows Easy Transfer, which can apparently make it pretty painless to move your user files, and settings—including mail—from Windows XP to a nice fresh installation of Windows 7. You need to install it on you XP computer but it comes pre-installed in Windows 7.

      I didn’t know how Easy Transfer would add the XP mail to Windows Live mailboxes containing existing mail. It only seemed to anticipate a transfer to a brand new installation of Windows 7.

      Would it merge the old with the new or would it overwrite the existing mailboxes altogether, thereby destroying the mail already on his laptop?

      To be safe, I opted for a manual approach.

      I found clear instructions on the Web; read through the steps carefully, and followed them slavishly.

      I found the stored mail data on the XP computer and copied it over to the Windows 7 computer using a flash drive. Then I was able to easily import the mail data into WLM.

      WLM didn’t add the Outlook mailboxes to the equivalent WLM mailbox. It stuck all the Outlook mail into a new imported mail folder under the the regular WLM folders.

      You can’t drag the Outlook folders. You have to create new WLM folders where you want them and drag the Outlook email messages into the new folders.

      To move the contents of your Outlook Inbox into the WLM Inbox, you can shift-select all the messages in the Outlook Inbox and drag them into the WLM Inbox; same with going from Outlook Drafts to WLM Drafts, etc.

      Hopefully there’s a faster way I just didn’t find, because I don’t imagine more than one in a thousand Windows XP users going to that kind of trouble.

      Stanley Q. Woodvine is a homeless resident of Vancouver who has worked in the past as an illustrator, graphic designer, and writer.

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