Windows XP will pass another milestone on the road to retirement next week when Microsoft withdraws mainstream support for the operating system..

While the company said that it will continue to provide free security fixes for XP until 2014, any future bugs found in the platform will not be fixed unless customers pay for additional support.

Mainstream support for XP will end on 14 April 2009, over seven years after the operating system originally shipped.

However, the passing of the deadline will place Microsoft in the unusual position of no longer offering mainstream support for its most widely used product. Windows XP accounts for about 63 per cent of all internet connected computers, according to March 2009 statistics from Hitslink, while Windows Vista makes up about 24 per cent.

Windows XP also continues to be sold with low-cost mini laptops, otherwise known as netbooks, as Vista is too heavy on system resources for this level of hardware.

Microsoft is imploring millions of Windows 7 beta testers to perform a clean install of the forthcoming Release Candidate, rather than upgrade from the beta.

The company claims its telemetry shows that millions of people are running Windows 7 full time. However, it’s asking those customers to go through the pain of a clean installation because it wants to test the real-world upgrade experience.

“The RC is about getting breadth coverage to validate the product in real-world scenarios,” the company claims on the Engineering Windows 7 blog. “As a result, we want to encourage you to revert to a Vista image and upgrade or to do a clean install, rather than upgrade the existing Beta.”

Facebook has ended its brief e-relationship with The Pirate Bay, the controversial BitTorrent search engine.

The Pirate Bay added a “Share on Facebook” button around two weeks ago to its site that allowed its users to post links to small information files, called torrents, on Facebook. The torrents are used to download audio, video and other content via the BitTorrent P-to-P (peer-to-peer) file-sharing network.

Facebook is now blocking those so-called “bookmarklets” as well as any links from The Pirate Bay, said Peter Sunde, of The Pirate Bay. The development was first reported by the file-sharing blog TorrentFreak.

Sunde said he received an e-mail from Facebook justifying the action because of the legal proceedings against The Pirate Bay.

Sunde and three other men are awaiting return of a verdict on April 17 from a trial that concluded early last month in Stockholm. They are charged with helping to make available material under copyright.

The Pirate Bay