As most know, Microsoft has ended support for their old XP operating system. This despite at least 20% of computers in use still run XP.
I have an old machine still running XP. This machine is mostly used by my grand daughter when she visits. It runs fine. I don't plan to upgrade it anytime soon.
Tuesday night, while she was playing a game, it locked up. I rebooted it and it would not start Windows.
I finally got around to addressing it yesterday. It started fine in safe mode....
I went online to see if I could find a fix. What I found was startling.
It seems that if you run XP and use Security Essentials as your AV, the previous update to XP and the anti-virus have a conflict. Countless numbers of users, worldwide, suddenly lost all functionality. Reports and stories were all over the various tech sites. Many were blaming Microsoft for installing a poison pill into the latest update, to force upgrading to a later OS. I don't believe Microsoft could be that stupid, but who knows for sure.
Whatever the cause, the result was not good for Microsoft.
The solution was simple enough.... Start in safe mode and disable Security Essentials. Reboot Windows normally and uninstall Security Essentials. I then used my spare license and installed Avast. Problem solved.
So, keep the above in mind should your older XP machine cease to function or load the OS. Microsoft did release one more XP update yesterday, which I assume was a patch to fix the conflict.
