Microsoft plans to support Windows XP Service Pack 3 until April 8, 2014, which means XP users have 30 months left before they're on their own.

This mysterious method for bypassing Windows XP's activation process is making headlines now, but may actually be years old.

You really, really need to dump Windows XP. No, really. Windows XP was great, and many users still love the operating system, but…it’s more than a decade old. At the rate technology evolves ...

In fact, there are still millions of people running Windows XP today, a dozen years after mainstream support ended and nearly twenty years after the OS was first launched.

Once Windows XP has been updated to SP3, users can then install IE7 and if necessary, later restore IE6. IE8 Beta 1 users should also uninstall the preview before upgrading, Microsoft says.

XP Mode, in theory, gives the new OS 100 per cent backwards compatibility with its ubiquitous ancestor. But what is it, how does it work and is it really the magic bullet it claims to be?