Live Chat In six months' time, it'll be open season for hackers, malware and virus-writers targeting people running Windows XP and Internet Explorer 6.

The reason is after 8 April, 2014, Microsoft will no longer make the software patches needed to protect these people from the worst of the web.

From the biggest to the smallest, nobody is safe. HM Revenue and Customs is still running Windows XP on 85,000 PCs, the NHS – one of the world’s largest employers – has 85 per cent of its PCs running Windows XP. Not even SMBs, the backbone of the economy, are immune, with Microsoft reckoning they own "just enough" PCs to be dangerous.

Join The Reg's end-of-Windows-XP Live Chat on Friday, 11 October at 15.00 UK time (7.00 Pacific, 10.00 ET, 14.00 UT) to find out how we got here and – importantly – what you can do to get out of this mess.

Joining us will be a trio who between them have moved hundreds of thousands of seats off Windows XP and IE6 in the last two years. They are: Mark Corley, chief technology officer at Avanade UK and Ireland; Gary Schare, president and COO of browser remediation and migration specialist Browsium; and - following a last minute switch from Camwood - Dave Martin, head of project services for the application portfolio management specialist Camwood.

We’ll be talking about:

• What they’ve seen inside customers' operations and lessons learned;
• Why you should at least draw up a migration plan, even if the suits veto it;
• Big bang versus piecemeal (re-write versus remediate); and
• Why your migration plan definitely shouldn’t, under any circumstances, be to upgrade only "as and when" you buy a brand-new PC running Windows 7

You can register in the window below.