Always remember this useful rule of thumb: "Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...</a>
Why bother doing any research when you can just claim the sky is falling and spam your blog on HN?<p><a href="http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/51ca501d-1ccd-4978-9e03-7705e772755a/winxp-activation-after-42014-end-of-support" rel="nofollow">http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/51c...</a>
Even I wouldn't run Windows XP past December 2014. Install to exploit time would probably be under an hour.<p>Trying to get a migration plan in place. I'm extremely comfortable with linux but not sure if I want to run it as my desktop.
If the activation servers do gets shut off, I hope MS will release an update to disable activation or an utility to generate the confirmation ID from the installation ID.