Windows 10

[emjay]

Can you still get the service packs for XP or would it best just to leave it offline except for activating?

If you do not already have SP3, you will need to hunt it down on M$.com.  After that, all will go well.  The automatic updates work, there is just no longer any support.  In anticipation of a complete shutdown of XP, I have a disk image and full backup of a freshly installed and updated system.  It makes life simple.

Thanks for all this great info   And having an image like that sounds like a really great idea. I'm in no desperate rush to do this (not to mention haven't got a clue how to do it from Linux   ) but when the time comes I'll bear all this in mind. Basically it's just for one game really, Civ2, and that wasn't all that great on a netbook anyway because the screen was too small and the bottom half of the game was missing... so I had to learn to play it without seeing my trade routes unless I plugged in an external monitor   But just to get the image backup it does seem worth doing, cos it could always come in handy, so thanks for the tip