Windows XP user survey shows little hope for change

Last week was the much talked about XPocalypse, meaning support came to an official end for XP, despite a large number of users, both home and business, still running the operating system. It seems that this setback isn't doing much to daunt those users, either.

Security firm Avast has released a survey it conducted just before April 8th, and results will be disappointing to Microsoft. Many customers plan to stick it out with the aging platform.

An earlier survey indicated that 23.6 percent of Avast’s users were still running Windows XP, and that number has only decreased by 2 percent.

The latest numbers are a bit stunning -- 21 percent of users apparently had no clue that support was even coming to a close, only 15 percent planned to upgrade, and 27 percent have no plans to change anything.

"Avast has been creating protection modules and detections specifically designed to cover Windows XP vulnerabilities and other security problems. We recommend non-Avast Windows XP users download Avast for the added protection. Avast 2014 is a light product, both in terms of speed and resource consumption, tailored for older PCs running XP. In addition to this, we recommend users stop using Internet Explorer, as the browser poses an even larger threat when used on Windows XP", the company says.

Avast isn't the only security firm that plans to continue support for the ancient OS, even Microsoft's own Security Essentials will continue for another year. The suggestion that users switch from IE to another browser like Chrome or Firefox is a good one, as well as not running the OS as administrator. However, upgrading remains the best, and safest option.