Even prior to the recent recession the Windows XP operating system was still proving popular with customers.
- The regular services packs made it stable and secure.
- Vista was not a roaring success/improvement so many users put off upgrading to Vista.
- PCs and laptops from 2000 to 2004 were already very fast and had sufficient performance for managing the bulk of applications that regular users were using.
Once the recession hit,users chose to stick with the old XP systems,perhaps even upgrading the RAM/CPU if performance was proving an issue. The fact that RAM for 5/6/7 year old computers than for newer machines meant it was economically viable to simply upgraded memory rather than move to a new OS/computer.
Prolonging XP’s useful life has resulted in a need to support the older system,principally around computer repair and maintenance. Ultimately software vendors,including Microsoft,will stop supporting their applications on XP and we will all need to upgrade or tolerate using older applications (which perhaps isn’t such a bad thing anyway). In the meantime there is still a need for people and services for computer repair and maintenance.
There will always be a need for computer experts that you can drop your PC off to for repairs and they can remedy both hardware and software issues. The majority of users will invariably attempt the repairs for themselves first usually using online advice for pointers.
In the case of software issues most users will attempt the repairs themselves prior to resorting to computer experts. There is a growing PC maintenance software industry that can assist users in effecting repairs for themselves,and for XP the Reimage repair application is one of the better solutions (and my tool of choice since 2005).
For a number of years now I have been running 4 computers using Windows XP (media box,music production,work laptop,family laptop). I was not impressed by Vista so didn’t make the move up on any of them. Maintaining the machines involved the usual activities – backing up data regularly,getting Windows updates automatically and clearing out caches/temp files/unused applications on a regular basis. However,when I experienced a blue screen exception I ended up turning to Reimage to attempt the repairs.
When an issue such as this occurs it is hard to know whether it is the registry,the operating system or application files that are at fault. Reimage focuses on repairing all 3 rather than merely specializing in just one.
It works in a 3 stage process,all of which operates from within a browser as it needs to query their online knowledge base
- Scan:The application scans the registry for orphaned keys,missing keys and incorrectly set keys. The file system is checked for trojan/virus files,missing files (for applications) and file versions (to ascertain if newer versions exist).
- Report:The scan report details the list of faults giving you the information to repair them yourself or let Reimage make the PC fixes.
- Repair:The application pull down any necessary files from their repository of over 20 million. The registry keys are set according to their knowledge base of healthy key settings – something which can optimize even a healthy machine to perform better.
The full process took under 30 minutes to scan and repair my blue screen issues (the exception code was 0x80072F76 which relates to a registry issue) and since then I have used Reimage to periodically make repairs on all my XP systems. At the very least,running the scan stage is a good means of checking the system’s health.
Ultimately,we will all need to move over to Windows 7,or whatever follows it,but in the meantime it makes economic sense to recycle and prolong the useful working life of our old XP machines.
That is something new and interesting,thanks for sharing.