Looks like Microsoft decided to extend the lifetime of everyone’s favorite operating system, Windows XP, to May 30, 2009. The death of XP was originally slated for the end of January, but due to the popularity of Microsoft’s hard-to-kill operating system and the slow adoption rate of Vista, they decided to extend it a few months longer.

Is anyone really surprised by this? How many of you out there are still using XP? If you are, do you plan to go to Vista any time soon?

I tried Vista a while back. I used it for a few weeks, but really it didn’t do anything more for me that XP didn’t already do, and in fact it didn’t do at least one thing that I really needed.

I know I have an old flatbed scanner. It has a big sticker on it proclaiming it’s flawless compatibility with Windows 98, for Pete’s sake, but you know what? It worked perfectly for me in Windows XP. I didn’t have to install any drivers or software for it. It just worked. Vista? No worky.

There’s a lot of paperwork flying around my house and I scan a lot of it for archival purposes. So I need my scanner. The one I have works just fine. I don’t need to buy a new one, and all of my other software still works without any problems.

I think that’s part of the reason why Microsoft is having such a hard time killing Windows XP. It’s been around for such a long time and it’s gotten so deeply entrenched on everyone’s desktop, people just don’t want to change to a new way of doing things, and in a lot of cases they don’t want to replace perfectly good hardware to use an operating system that doesn’t offer them anything better.