Hey Neto, I hear what your saying. What got me, was the fact I haven't heard boo about XP getting axed. A lot of people did, but a lot more didn't and are in the same boat as me. Not knowing the internal workings puts you at a real disadvantage of what or where to go next. Windows 7 looks like the next move, but if it's based on the same premise as XP it will get dropped in the near future as well. Windows 8 and 8.1 sound like they won't work on the computer I have (although it's not all that old and works fine) it's going to be the only game in town in the near future. Still can't help feeling like I/we are being forced into a direction I/we wouldn't have taken otherwise. My spidie senses are a tinglin.
You are most certianly right - they ARE trying to stear us all in a dircetion they have chosen. It is 'Cloud Computing", where the computer you work on is just a "dumb terminal", and all of the programs, etc, are away on the internet someplace. And as opposed to what we are used to, where you buy a license to a program and then you can use it as long as you please, they want to charge you an annual fee to use the program. For example, I bought a license for Word 97 in, well, about 97 or 98. I still use it, because I like the way it works, and between it and also having the free program OpenOffice or LibreOffice, it does everything I need to do. I think that they have been watching what the government does, and they want to "tax" us all to keep using the programs.
I'll admit that I hated XP when I got my first computer that came with it. In fact, after a bit of that, I wiped it and installed Windows 98 SE. I only went back to XP when my kids gave me a flash drive, and I couldn't find any Win 98 drivers for it. With every version there are some good things, and some bad things. Windows 8 just has a LOT of bad things, and actually, I can't think of ANY good things. Others will have different opinions, and if I were working on a laptop or tablet with touch screen, and if all I wanted to do with it was to surf the web and do email, then I'd probably be OK with it. Like what one guy said: "I don't mind if my phone works like my computer, but I don't want my computer to work like my phone."
So sorry for never saying anything here about them giving XP the ax - it's just that I came here to this forum to learn more about fabrication (especially chassis fab), and didn't want to corrupt the site with lots of OT stuff. (I think they set that date about 4 years ago, if not before.) Oh, and yeah, Win 7 will eventually get the ax, too. But I suspect that it will outlast Win 8 & 8.1. XP came out in 2002 or so, so it had a pretty long life. I'll be happy if Win 7 hangs on that long.