By Jeremy Quittner, a staff writer for Inc. magazine and Inc.com

It’s not particularly sexy or even nice to look at, but lots of you still use Windows XP, because it’s stable and it still works pretty well.
But April is the cruelest month, as they say, and you can expect problems to ensue, when Microsoft is expected to cease supporting the nearly 20-year-old operating system. If you plan to work on Windows, you’ll either have to upgrade to versions 7 or 8, or just hope for the best if you decide to ignore the warnings and stick with XP.

“Currently we still have three computers running Windows XP and there really is no reason to upgrade other than the fact that is stopping the support for XP,” says Vladimir Gendelman, founder of Company Folders in Detroit, Michigan.

Gendelman’s company is 10 years old and has 12 employees and more than $2 million in annual revenues. It prints presentation folders for other businesses, and has a total of 12 computers, half of which are Macs. Gendelman says he still appreciates XP’s ease of use and stability.

“The older you get, the more you want things you need, not just because they’re cool,” Gendleman adds. “You want more basic things, and that is XP, I love it for its simplicity and the fact that it actually works.”

Gendelman isn’t alone. About 20 percent of all small business computers in Western Europe and North America are still running XP, according to a Forrester Research Forrsights Hardware survey from the third quarter of 2013. (Forrester analyst Christopher Sherman in a recent blog post that Microsoft will offer custom support for XP, after the April 8 end-of-life deadline. But that’s probably delaying the inevitable, he says.)

Relax! Like Gendelman, find out how other EO members made the upgrade…