Using XP? After today, it’s virtual XP or not at all

That is, if you’re smart, because today is THE DAY.  Nevermind this advice on upgrading.  If you haven’t already or your enterprise hasn’t already, you’re probably not going to upgrade because:

  1. You’re a Luddite who is just now getting to know the interface and the thought of switching is just dreadful
  2. You have a legacy application that just hates the hardware abstraction architecture of Vista/7/8 and are waiting for for the application to retire
  3. Both

I do a lot of work with production shops that rely heavily on legacy CAD/CAM packages with HASP Hardlock (Parallel port) dongles in play for their CNC machining and design work.  Guess what doesn’t work on Windows Vista/7/8?  Those HASP HL dongles.  Guess what software houses want to charge for replacing those dongles with compatible software and hardware?

If you guessed FULL RETAIL PRICE, claim your prize.  Little shops that have 2-10 software licenses running on legacy XP because “they have to” (i.e., they can’t afford to drop $250K to replace software that already works) will have a big problem on their hands, unless we virtualize those desktops and are capable of performing on demand snapshot rollbacks.

Blam!  Out of nowhere, a new use case for VDI: small shop dongle defense.  Why are we still using these things, anyway?

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