In the age of popups, unwanted third party software and other scams, there has been some concern by a handful of Windows XP users about the popup window warning you that Windows XP is going to expire.


For a change, we can report that this is a genuine Windows popup appearing only on Windows XP machines as support gets ready to end on April 8th, 2014. If you are one of those people who was not sure if this was a genuine popup window then you’re the perfect candidate to upgrade.

The popup can be confirmed by Microsoft:



"In the interest of educating all our customers about Windows XP end-of-support, Windows Update will send a pop-up dialog box to reachable Windows XP machines with an end of support notification. The notification will state, “Learn about the end of support for Windows XP (April 8, 2014).” The notification will first be sent on March 8, 2014 at 3pm local time, and is scheduled to be sent monthly thereafter.

We want you to know that the notification is genuine. If you don’t want to see the notification again, please click “Do not show this message again” to stop the notification from recurring.
Please contact Microsoft or our valued partners for assistance."

Windows XP will still work but you will not get any more security updates. There is enough XP market share for the bad guys to consider exploiting known security holes. We at MajorGeeks love XP as much as the next guy but we recommend upgrading to Windows 7, the best choice since XP. You could always dual boot XP for nostalgia but that’s all Windows XP should be considered for after April.