Microsoft today announced that their aging operating system, Windows XP, has officially moved away from Mainstream Support and has transitioned into what they term as the Extended Support level. What this means to you is that Microsoft will no longer offer free support for Windows XP. Any problem you may have with the OS that requires a phone call to Microsoft will also require that you pull out your credit card.

Windows XP has served us well , so don’t free too much over it. The venerable OS has been on the market for over seven years. Microsoft usually only offers five years of mainstream support. They will still provide free security patches via Windows Update, but no new features will be added nor old ones fixed. More information can be found in this article over at Computerworld.

My advice: don’t buy a new computer until Windows 7 (the successor to Vista) comes out. Windows 7 is what Vista should have been. It will be worth the wait and you won’t need to suffer through Vista’s many annoyances.