Always remember this useful rule of thumb: "Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

Why bother doing any research when you can just claim the sky is falling and spam your blog on HN?

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/51c...

That thread does not actually conclusively answer the question.

"The end of Windows XP support will not affect activation, but rather security updates and phone/online technical support." has been said many times for the last few years. I agree that this is a low quality blog post.

It may have been said many times, but the linked thread itself does not contain any official statements and is not particularly conclusive.

Even I wouldn't run Windows XP past December 2014. Install to exploit time would probably be under an hour.

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 you have essential software or hardware that only works with XP, you could buy a cheap wired-only router for each of your XP systems to keep them isolated from the rest of your network (which a friend's skeezy laptop might be trying to exploit without her knowledge when she brings it over to collaborate on a project).

The simple answer is: "No." Why was an entire article needed for this?

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.