14 DAY TRIAL // Windows XP remains the second most-used operating system worldwide, despite Microsoft's efforts to emphasize the risks of staying with an unsupported platform that no longer receives updates and security patches.
While statistics provided for the month of April 2014 show that 26 percent of the desktop computers worldwide are still running Windows XP, there are signs that things could change soon.
We already know that some large companies are currently in the process of migrating to a newer operating system, so it's only natural to expect a major market share drop for Windows XP in the coming months, but analysts expect to see more end users making the switch to Windows 7 or Windows 8.1.
In a note sent to clients on Friday, J.P. Morgan analysts revealed that there's evidence that the decline of the PC market is slowing down, partially thanks to computers that are upgraded from Windows XP to a newer platform.
“Despite fears of PC demand declining after the expiration of Windows XP support last month, we are beginning to see evidence that the Windows XP refresh cycle could continue to be a PC tailwind for the remainder of 2014,” the note they sent reads.
“We expect XP users to migrate to Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 over the next year, which should continue to be a driver of PC demand.”
In the meantime, Microsoft continues efforts to get users off Windows XP and warns with pretty much every single occasion that staying on this OS version could be very risky in case someone finds an unpatched vulnerability in the operating system.
And this already happened, as a recently-found flaw in Internet Explorer 8, which is also running on Windows XP, could allow an attacker to run malicious code on a vulnerable system using malware shipped through a compromised website.
Microsoft has already acknowledged the issue and said that a fix is coming, but hasn't provided any details as to when users could get it. The company might very well wait for the June Patch Tuesday rollout to release it, which means that until that point, users running Internet Explorer 8 on their computers could be vulnerable to attacks.
Windows XP computers however won't get the fix on the next Patch Tuesday, so their only options are to either upgrade to a different OS version or to give up on Internet Explorer entirely in the favor of a browser that still receives updates, such as Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox.