Ask Leo! #598 – PUPs, Unknown Partitions, Contacting Outlook.com Customer Service, and more…

To be clear, I have updated all our Windows PCs to Windows 10.

However, when reading discussions about such upgrading, I have yet to see a logical explanation why XP should suddenly become dangerous etc, literally overnight, because of MS Support being withdrawn.

Any remaining weaknesses and issues must remain the same as at that withdrawal - agreed not decreasing - but equally not increasing.

As the number of operating PCs using XP diminish directly or indirectly by moving to virtual versions, hacks for XP will be less attractive, so reducing the likelihood of attacks.

At that time, it had been updated for various aspects over several years, including particularly security, so was generally considered safer than when originally issued.

Contrast that with W10, a new or updated system, without its own years of testing and use, so theoretically more open to having as many if not more and different problems coming to light over the next few years, until proven otherwise in practice.

Vulnerabilities are not increasing. But the number of known vulnerabilities is. For example there's very likely a bug in Windows XP right now, though no one knows about it. In fact, it's in all versions of Windows. It's a bug that could be used by a hacker to compromise your machine. One day that bug is discovered, and hackers begin to use it. Microsoft fixes that bug in all versions of Windows that they support, which does not include Windows XP. XP still has the bug, and will always have the bug, and now hackers know about it and can exploit it.

"Windows 8 was not enormously different to Windows 7". Are you kidding me? It was COMPLETELY different. No Start button or menu. Tiles instead of icons. And that's why the Start menu was brought back in Windows 10 - because of the enormous outcry.

And yet, if you restored the start menu using something like Classic Shell ... there was little difference to be seen beyond that. It was most certainly NOT "completely" different.

Live your life in reality and not so much via electronics. Getting hacked is probably the best thing that ever happened to you. Brings you back to reality.

While I can understand the sentiment, email has connected me with more people more closely than anything else so far. And by connected I do mean "in reality", including friends I now meet with regularly that I would never have encountered otherwise, friends I've reconnected with to that same end, as well as family members - particularly overseas - for which email has made continued connection a practical reality. Yes I could have used "old technology" like pen and paper for each, but the pragmatic reality is that I likely would not have. Email made it all easier. Email made it all more likely to happen. Email made all this real connection possible. In reality.