Got Windows 2000? No free support for you!

As of June 30, 2005, Microsoft is discontinuing mainstream support for Windows 2000 (Pro & Servers). What is mainstream support? Mainstream support is the free support you get with the product. Microsoft is moving the Win2K family of operating systems into their “extended support” phase. This means that if you or your business wants support, you’ll have to pay.

There are two ways to look at this. One is that it’s a bad move because the majority of businesses that moved from NT networks are running Win2K networks, not Win2K3 servers. This will cause quite a few issues for the network admins that still need some help when troubleshooting a problem and they don’t want to hire a consultant. If Microsoft operating systems weren’t riddled with issues, this wouldn’t be a concern. Now, system/network admins will have to figure more support cost into operating their network.

The other way to see it is a good move by MS to make money. There are so many Win2K networks out there that, just by playing the numbers, you can see a lot of calls being generated. A lot of calls equals a lot of support fees collected.

I think this is a really bad move. Even though Win2K has been out for a long time, it’s still extremely useful and works very well. I would even say it works better than WinXP because of the lower resource usage. On equally configured machines, Win2K outperforms WinXP hands down. If Win2K was truely outdated and didn’t work well with current technology, I could understand dropping free support. Win2K has a lot of life left and Microsoft has failed to really show what Windows Server 2003 really has that would make someone switch from 2K to 2K3.

Microsoft is not going to release a Service Pack 5 for Win2K. Instead, they are going to release an update roll-up package.

“The Update Rollup will contain all security-related updates produced for Windows 2000 between SP4 and the time when Microsoft finalizes the contents of the Rollup, and a small number of important non-security updates. It’s designed to make it easy to keep Windows 2000 systems up to date with security updates and other important updates,” the spokesperson said.

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23.Apr.05 Operating Systems, Technology