Happy Winter Solstice everyone! The Mayan calendar flipped over yesterday, and everything continued as normal.

The next date to watch out for is ... drumroll please ... April 8, 2014. This is the date Microsoft has decided to [drop support for Windows XP].

While many large corporations are actively planning to get off Windows XP, there are still many homes and individuals that are running on this platform.

When [Windows XP] was introduced in 2001, it could support systems with as little as 64MB of RAM. Nowadays, the latest versions of Windows now requires a minimum of 1GB for 32-bit systems, with 2GB or 3GB recommended.

That leaves Windows XP users on older hardware few choices:

• Continue to run Windows XP, but without support (and hope for the best)
• Upgrade their hardware with more RAM (and possibly more disk space) needed to run a newer level of Windows
• Install a different operating system like Linux
• Put the hardware in the recycle bin, and buy a new computer

Here is a personal example. A long time ago, I gave my sister a Thinkpad R31 laptop so that she could work from home. When she got a newer one, she passed this down to her daughter for doing homework. When my neice got a newer one, she passed this old laptop to her grandma.

Grandma is fairly happy with her modern PC running Windows XP. She plays all kinds of games, scans photographs, sends emails, listens to music on iTunes, and even uses Skype to talk to relatives. Her problem is that this PC is located upstairs, in her bedroom, and she wanted something portable that she could play music downstairs when she is playing cards with her friends.

"Why not use the laptop you have?" I asked. Her response: "It runs very slow. Perhaps it has a virus. Can you fix that?" I was up for the challenge, so I agreed.

(The Challenge: Update the Thinkpad R31 so that grandma can simply turn it on, launch iTunes or similar application, and just press a "play" button to listen to her music. It will be plugged in to an electrical outlet wherever she takes it, and she already has her collection of MP3 music files. My hope is to have something that is (a) simple to use, (b) starts up quickly, and (c) will not require a lot of on-going maintenance issues.)

Here are the relevant specifications of the Thinkpad R31 laptop:

The system was pre-installed with Windows XP, but was terribly down-level. I updated to Windows XP SP3 level, downloaded the latest anti-virus signatures, and installed iTunes. A full scan found no viruses. All this software takes up 14GB, leaving less than 6GB for MP3 music files.

The time it took from hitting the "Power-on" button to hearing the first note of music was over 14 minutes! Unacceptable!

If you can suggest what my next steps should be, please comment below or send me an email!

technorati tags: IBM, Windows XP, Microsoft, Thinkpad