Windows XP losing official MS support

[ChurchOrganist]

Currently I have a story based Persistent world running on an Acer netbook running Windows XP which uses the nwnx_funcs extensions for the alteration of player stats etc.

As we all know Microsoft is ending support for WIndows XP in April 2014

The Acer netbook is incapable of running Windows 8 for hardware reasons.

What is the collective wisdom of the community re running Windows XP on a virtual machine within Linux?

Would this work?

[eeriegeek]

Hey,

That's a hard question to answer without knowing a little more about what you want to accomplish. If the laptop is running well, I would just update it to the last XP patch, keep it behind a firewall with only port 5121 open, and keep good backups.

If you already have a reliable Linux machine, can you consider just migrating to Linux? The nwnx_funcs plugin is available there, though you would have to check the exact function availability. It would be easier to manage than virtual hosting.

If you are thinking of re-installing your laptop with Linux to host a Windows XP virtual machine I would tend to advise against it. It should be possible, but it sounds like your laptop is already hardware challenged plus some older hardware doesn't support hardware virtuallization (so slower yet.)

[Baaleos]

I guess we need to understand what you intend to use the laptop for:

If you intend to use the laptop for personal stuff, besides running the server: then yes - install whatever OS you desire - within the hardware restrictions, and then virtualize your server environment.

If however you want to use the laptop for server and only for a server, then you can just keep Windows XP installed, and worry not about updating etc.

If Windows XP is currently working for you, on that laptop, then there is no reason why it would break in the forseeable future: besides hardware fault or manual interference of some kind.

Its kinda logical to presume that
If the server is working, and is not broken, its only likely to get broken, if some external negative is introduced.
Get your server into a completely working state, then turn off updates and let it run as your server pc.

If you do however feel there is a risk of failure, I recommend using a virtual machine, and keep the machine image stored somewhere else - as a backup.

I personally use Amazon EC2 (For the first year, you can run a micro instance for free)
Its great for backing up, and doing testing of integrations between servers etc.

[ChurchOrganist]

Thanks for that input.

The netbook is pretty much a dedicated server now although it occasionally gets used for reading PDFs and a bit of web usage with Firefox.

The only other function it has on a regular basis is to display a copy of the module in the toolset to save continually having to write down tags etc on bits of paper

Most advice fro the tech sites is that Windows XP will be highly vulnerable to malicious attacks from Trojans etc once MS pull the plug, and my main concern is to keep the PW server secure.