Defenestration

You may have heard that WIndows XP, the computer operating system used by many, including myself, will no longer be supported by Microsoft.  I received a large notice to this effect from Bill Gates himself, well maybe not from him, with all sorts of dire warnings.  That means that if there is a problem with XP, you are on your own (scare tactics).  So I decided to upgrade to the next level, Windows 7, rather than the latest version Windows 8.1, which is being pushed by Microsoft, but many people have said they dislike Windows 8, since it is quite a departure from the previous versions of Windows.

I started the switching process by accessing a MS file entitled "How to upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7."  This is a 17 page, 5 step process.  I managed to get to step 2, which is making a copy of all the contents of my hard disk onto an external disk drive using a program called Microsoft Easy Transfer.  The idea is that when you install Windows 7 you can then retrieve all your files and data. This seemed to work OK, and gave me a report consisting of 11 pages of virtually incomprehensible information.  But, they explained that this process save files, but does not save programs.  So when you make the transition to Windows 7, you have to individually reload all the programs that you were using before.  What a headache.

The next step is to load Windows 7 into your computer.  But, wait a minute, I don't have Windows 7, so I went to the Microsoft store to buy it.  But, lo and behold after much trying I discovered that they don't sell Windows 7 any more.  They only want you to upgrade to WIndows 8, which means buying that, even if you don't want to.  The alternative is to download Windows 7 from a web-site.  But, I checked and read an analysis that warned against doing that, it said that most versions of Windows 7 that are available on-line are either modified or corrupted.  So I spent a half a day trying to transfer to Windows 7 and then had to give up. Another friend suggested switching to a version of Linux called Ubuntu, a different operating system, that is freely available.  On my sons's advice I am sticking with XP for now, I think I'd rather do nothing and wait and see what happens.