It's just putting off the eventual reality - Microsoft has disowned its most historically successful OffSpring, and continues to slowly strangle XP. Still, over one fifth of PC users hang on to it...
My advice is to cut the ties
now if you want to run XP, dump MSE, Defender, Windows Updates, MSIE, WER and all the other dross that Microsoft uses to slow up the system (sometimes as much as a minute of startup time or lots more, when updates are being installed), and use a Security solution that has no allegiance to Microsoft - from China!
Baidu* could be China's equivalent of Google, but does offer a few (Ch)English free products, such as the Baidu Spark Browser**, Antivirus, and a cleanup and performance utilities suite, PCFaster, none of which seem to be tethered to China's political entanglements.
The browser is minimalist like Chrome, but without any Googleness (whatever that may mean!), and has the neat abilities to download YouTube streams as MP4 videos with a single click and harvest torrents from web pages without having to search for them - so the pages can be in Russian or Arabic or Urdu - whatever - and it has an excellent torrent client to download the file. The browser is fast and competent, and can harvest your shortcuts from any browsers you use, and sync accounts. It also has some neat mouse gestures and drawing tools.
The Antivirus is also free of advertising*** and is also fast. It may have a few false positives - it seems to always warn about autorun.inf on USB flash drives, for example, but the warning is easily dismissed if you are sure that the file is benign.
PCFaster is a boon to XP users with lumbering bloated systems. It cleans "Junks" (sic), orphaned Registry entries, unnecessary startup programs that slow you down, unreleased memory, has antimalware defence, missing hotfix downloads and installs from MS, disk defragmenter, disk full warnings, and can make XP running on the original hardware faster than many people without SSDs can do with Windows 8 on original modern hardware.
It has the annoying habit of letting you know that your PC is in danger of "Crushing" if one of your disk volumes is getting dangerously full, but you can get it to ignore that drive. Being primarily designed for XP (running on older, hotter CPUs), if it finds your processor running at 100% for too long, it also warns you of the potential danger of crashing.
For instance, I have a Pentium 4 (Fujitsu Siemens Scaleo-P) with 2GB RAM, that routinely boots to usability in around 30-40 seconds with XP. In Windows 7, I cannot get it below about 50 seconds, and I would not recommend PCFaster for Windows 8 either.
Beware the Baidu Apps store - it has the same sort of rubbish that plagues the Microsoft Windows 8 store.
*
Baidu - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
**
Baidu Spark makes Internet surfing easier (with links to other free products at end of page)
***I use a hosts file modification, so I don't see advertising anyway, so I may be wrong here?
I'm just a fan, not an employee, but if you still want to run XP, give it a try!
