RIP Windows 2000, XP lives on

Rodney Gedda

Rodney Gedda is the former deputy editor of CIO and former editor of Techworld.

This week Microsoft announced the end of support for Windows XP SP2 and Windows 2000. XP SP3, however, won’t be dropped until 2014. It’s a big change, but does anyone still use Windows 2000? From July 13 people using Windows XP SP2 and Windows 2000 will no longer receive support updates.

In the case of XP there are still way too many installations out there for Microsoft to pull the plug on it completely. In fact, I need to check if my Windows XP partition is on SP2 or SP3!

A Windows XP SP3 supported for another four years (April 2014) should allow people enough time to upgrade to Windows 7. It would be interesting to see if the computer hardware requirements of Windows XP and 7 are on par with each other to avoid another Vista fiasco.

Given that XP was first released at the early part of the decade I’m inclined to agree with Microsoft wanting to phase it out. I understand it’s not easy for Microsoft, with its massive Windows install base, to transition people to a new release in a hurry.

The PC upgrade cycle will run its course and most people will have Windows 7 put in front of them soon anyway, but for those who feel they have “all that they need” with Windows XP it may need to be yanked from their cold dead hands.

In the case of Windows 2000 – good riddance! There are so many compelling reasons for businesses to upgrade their Windows Server infrastructure I’m not going to bother writing about it here.

Windows 2000 on the desktop practically died when XP came along, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it, and its predecessor Windows NT, are still kicking around in a few places.

But today’s virtualisation options make keeping old servers running to satisfy point applications a dead-end strategy. If anyone has an application that can’t be modernised and absolutely positively requires Windows 2000 or NT I’d love to hear about it. And don’t say you weren’t warned.

That said, it’s the Extended Support phase of Windows 2000 that is ending next month. According to Microsoft 2000 will no longer be publicly supported after July 14, but “Self-Help Online Support” will be available for a minimum of 12 months after the Extended Support phase ends.

So Windows NT and 2000 have officially reached the end of their natural lives.

When the came into the world they carved out a new industry in distributed client-server systems. Back in the 90s Unix and mainframes ruled the data centres and Microsoft was keen to make a name for itself in the business computing market.

Nowadays the IT landscape has changed so much people don’t need on-premise applications and servers. We still invest in computing infrastructure of course, but public cloud and SaaS options add a whole new dimension the blanket term of “information management”.

If you need to manage servers then Linux has also risen to become a viable alternative to both Unix and Windows.

Speak up if you think Microsoft is being too aggressive with its support lifecycles. Before you do though, keep in mind two things: if you think Microsoft is alone in cutting off support to get people to upgrade to more recent versions of its software think again; and the sheer size of its install base makes it unique among software suppliers.