Windows XP SP2 32 bit support stops tomorrow

With all the nVidia GTX460 excitement today it would be easy to forget that Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) is no longer being supported by updates from tomorrow.

Yes, in case you missed it, Microsoft stop support for XP SP2 tomorrow, the six year old edition of the operating system. This means that you will not get any more security patches, even if its classed as critical severity. No more patches for Internet Explorer, and no more fixes for Outlook Express or Windows Media Player.

How can you work around this? Well you can always upgrade to XP SP3 which gets support until April 2014 and you can do this by following the information on this page.

If you are using the 64 Bit version of SP2 then you are going to continue to get support as SP3 has no 64 bit version available.

While this should cover most people, if you need to stick with XP 32bit SP2 for some software related reason then we suggest you ditch Internet Explorer and get the new Firefox or Opera browsers as they will continue to be updated on a regular basis. This would be the wisest step as a lot of the major security issues are related to the browser you use.

KitGuru says: Are you on XP? then we suggest you make the leap and have a look at Windows 7.

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