What this means is that MS will neither look for nor fix any further bugs/problems with XP. (A friend of ours thought that XP would evaporate on the critical date.) MS 'support' has always been a bit patchy. It might be worth seeing if the old laptop can cope with Win7 which is still available from a number of suppliers (including Novatech, usual disclaimer). Watch out for older scanners and printers for which drivers aren't available for Win7. If not, just make sure that your firewall and anti-virus software is up to date (plenty of good free ones, eg Avast, AVG, ZoneAlarm) which still seem to be providing updates for XP versions. Of course, you won't get the latest Internet Explorer (some of us consider this a plus). If worried, switch to Firefox or similar, also still updating XP versions at time of writing. A reasonably modern Mac should be able to run Win7 in a virtual machine, or even Win 8 if you must. As Win7 can be tweaked to look and feel just like Win XP, it shouldn't be too bad running XP on a laptop and 7 in a virtual machine on the Mac. Bob