Windows XP drops out of support on April 8. From that date it will no longer receive any fixes for security problems found in the operating system. Security researchers and hackers alike will, however, continue to find security flaws in the operating system beyond that date. It's likely that some unfixed flaws will become public almost immediately after April 8, as patches for other, supported versions of Windows—especially Windows Server 2003—will betray the existence of Windows XP bugs.

In spite of this, Windows XP remains in widespread use, be it to power your doctor's medical record system or the information displays at the airport, or be it on your parents' occasionally used but not quite retired PC. By some measures, about 30 percent of the Web-using world is on Windows XP.

Any organization with a proper IT department knows that Windows XP is on the way out. They might not all have done anything in response, perhaps hoping that Microsoft will offer an 11th-hour reprieve and support extension, or they might have decided to pay Redmond large sums of money for private support, but they do at least know that there's an issue.

The same does not appear to be true of many home users. From our perspective, Microsoft has done little to inform these Windows users that there's a problem. The company is now calling for technically minded folk—the kind who read the official Windows Experience blog—to upgrade their friends and family to Windows 8.1.

Two paths are suggested: upgrade PCs that can meet the Windows 8.1 specs, replace ones that can't.

The post also highlights the difficulties in actually doing this. There's no upgrade path from Windows XP to Windows 8.1, so the "upgrade" requires reinstalling every piece of software and restoring all data from backup—a process that's, at best, enormously tedious and time-consuming. The PC industry would no doubt love for everyone using Windows XP to buy new systems, but it's too late for that now anyway. There are too many Windows XP machines and not enough time to replace them all.

If Microsoft wanted to reach out to home users to get them to upgrade or replace Windows XP machines, the time to do so was probably two years ago, not less than two months before the operating system drops out of support. Moreover, it needed to be far more aggressive: a direct upgrade solution from Windows XP is probably a necessary evil, and some kind of "cash for clunkers" incentive scheme to replace old PCs was probably also necessary. The Windows XP situation is a mess. Extending support (as the company has done for the Security Essentials anti-malware software) isn't a solution, as it would just make the mess last even longer, with little evidence that the extra time would be used for the necessary migrations.

All we can do now is hope that nothing important using Windows XP is on the 'net, and that it'll be someone else's medical records that get compromised, not our own.