I’ve written Put a Plan in Place Now to Upgrade From Windows XP to let you know support will be ending on April 8, 2014. Now you have less than five months before Microsoft ends support and the bad guys do everything they can to compromise your computer.

Even without being infected, there is a runaway algorithm that can slow your Windows XP computer to a crawl every time you boot! For details, read Exponential algorithm making Windows XP miserable could be fixed. In short, there have been so many updates released for Windows XP that it is taking Windows XP as long as an hour to go through the list and determine which patches you need.

The article says that Microsoft could fix it before April. Or since support is ending, they may not ever fix it. Yes, the update process does cost a bit of money and it can take some time. I put together some suggestions for Preparing to Move Computer From Windows XP to Windows 8.1. We did make the move in our office a couple of weeks ago and the five-year old computer that we upgraded from Windows XP to Windows 8.1 is performing noticeably faster.

There were two major items we felt needed to be changed. First, we have no use whatsoever for the “Start screen” in Windows 8. This is the thing with all the tiles. Installing Start8 solved that problem quickly. The other major problem is Internet Explorer 11 having major problems with several Web sites, including our site. I can’t recommend highly enough you simply use another browser. But if you must use Internet Explorer, please take a few seconds to change one setting so everything works!