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Question

Windows XP at work?

Apr 5, 2014 2:44AM PDT

I have a Windows XP at work ad wonder what I can do to be sure all my private information is cleaned off it before 4/8. I'm afraid some of my info will be held in the network.

I'm going to speak to someone to try ad get a Windows 7, but the budget is tight there. Any other suggestions?

Thanks.

Discussion is locked

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Answer
Not much you can do
Apr 5, 2014 3:11AM PDT

Not much you can do, though it's very advisable to keep as much personal information off a work computer as you possibly can. Forget what will happen after Microsoft finally ends support in a couple of days, companies have generally gone significantly overboard on the whole spying on employees thing in general. Do you really want to be making their life easier by putting a bunch of personal info on a system they have every legal right to rifle through any time they choose?

If it were me, I'd probably play the card of no matter how tight the budget is for new software, it will be a drop in the bucket compared to the costs associated with lost productivity, paying someone to clean up the XP systems and everything else associated with the computer being compromised. Stacked up against that, the cost of even buying a new computer just to get a supported version of Windows would be cheap.

I haven't had a chance to look into the particulars, but I see Best Buy is apparently running some kind of promotion where you get a minimum of $100 trade-in value for any computer running XP starting tomorrow, the 6th. Could help defray costs even more. Assuming they get $100 for your current computer and replace it with something that retails for $500, now it's a $400 computer. Now let's just say that they pay some IT person $20/hr to handle basically everything. Even if yours is the only XP computer in the entire company and the IT person is smart and has a disc image they can slap on your computer every time it's compromised... It'll still probably take at least an hour to reimage the system, so that's $20, plus your wages/salary for that time, along with however much money the company is losing because you're not able to do your job. By the second incident, it's likely the company will be saving money by getting a new computer relative to continually fixing yours, especially since the frequency of the exploit events will only increase over time. That also is only taking into consideration software issues. Hardware failures also start increasing in probability the older a computer gets and it's easy to get nickeled and dimed to death in such situations. Instead of scrapping the computer early on, you waste a lot of money affecting temporary repairs until one day you look back and you've spent more than a brand new computer would have cost trying to keep the old one running as parts become more and more scarce and prices go up on them.

To me, the smart play would be for the managers of the business to go to a local bank and take out a modest loan to buy replacement computers for any of the XP systems still around. The interest paid on the loan will still be a bargain compared to the costs associated with trying to maintain any number of XP systems over even just the short to medium term.

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Many in business and government will be slow to change
Apr 5, 2014 5:31AM PDT

Remember that, when buying a PC, you're really buying a vending machine. It's only as good as someone makes products that fit inside of it and will pass through to the front door for retrieval. As those products change size or packaging, you need a new vending machine. Another reason for slow turnaround of an OS, IMO, is IT itself. It takes a while for them to become familiar and be able to take complete control of a system . Once they're comfortable, a new OS is out there. But I think government and anything government related will be the worst at getting them to move. Government regulation, believe it or not, is a barrier to change. I worked for a company that produces medical laboratory equipment that was either PC controlled or connected. This meant FDA approval. FDA approval meant no change in the computer hardware or software could be made without extensive testing and resubmitting the changes to the FDA for approval again. This meant the manufacturer had to purchase enough of the same boxes and software licenses to support the product through it's expected sales life and required support life. Ten years or more isn't unusual for these instruments to remain in service. PCs that died couldn't be replaced with anything else but PCs that were used when the device was FDA approved. What a nightmare when stock ran out.

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I don't buy it
Apr 5, 2014 8:16AM PDT

I don't buy it, because all you're describing is poor management. I'm not challenging you in that FDA and ISO requirements for medical devices can be very stringent, since we both know that would be a losing proposition. I happen to work at a medical device manufacturer myself right now. However, what I am saying is what you're describing is company management that failed to take these regulations into account during the planning phase of product development.

It doesn't matter if it's Windows or anything else, as a manufacturer, you plan your product lifecycle around that of your own vendors. If one of them tells you they will only be selling some component for 5 years, as an example, only an idiot then decides to market a product based on that component with a lifecycle over 5 years. Unless you're willing to buy up and store massive quantities of spares and carry that on the books.

In this case, Microsoft is not Apple, who just stops supporting products on a whim and never bothers telling anyone like they did recently with Mac OS X 10.6. Microsoft has clear timelines laid out even before any given version of Windows is released. If you then decide that you're going to plan to have your product extend past that cutoff date, you're an idiot and as far as I'm concerned the FDA and ISO should land on top of your company with all their regulatory weight. If you're willing to casually disregard clearly communicated time tables from one of your key vendors, what else might be going on in your company? What other corners might have been cut in the zeal to increase profits?

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How long do we expect a PC to last and how long
Apr 5, 2014 12:58PM PDT

do some pieces of equipment last? All I'm saying is that, with the FDA involved in approving the sale of medical equipment and government regulations as to how long support must be given, there is no way to predict what will happen with the next generation of PCs and operating systems. Management can't control every aspect of product development, implementation and the need for adequate sustaining engineering when they don't control what PCs and operating systems are coming down the pike. You might know that it takes many years to bring some new medical devices to market and the technology turns over during almost entirely between a product's concept and first sale. The sales life can't be shorter than the product development and approval time. I was with this company for over 30 years working in field service and got to see how the FDA and government regulation made it difficult to keep products operating beyond the expected life of the PC attached to it. It's not that engineers were not capable of adapting new PC technology as instruments aged but that the newer technology needed to mature to where it was safe to adapt it. After that, it's back to the FDA for approval. By the time it's approved, the PC technology is far behind what you can buy for your home or business office. I've been out of work for over two years now but, when I left, we were still running W2K PCs on our more advanced systems. The next generations which would have XP had been in the works for years already and before W7 was even released. That's just how it goes.

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Answer
depends on what you are willing to do
Apr 6, 2014 1:32PM PDT

You can take in a LIVE USB or LIVE DVD version of Linux, boot to it, and have it do a null "dd" of the entire drive, overwriting everything on it with zeroes. IT will love you for that one, lol. You could swap drives out of it, with similar drive, keep the one with your data on it, but might get caught or in trouble for that one, especially since business files would be on it. Your safest bet with both job and data in mind is to just delete what is private and then fill the drive up with useless large files to overwrite what was there too, then delete those large files to get the space back. You shouldn't keep private files on work computer. My wife uses a USB flashdrive which I installed TrueCrypt on and she keeps her private files on it. Consider similar for future.