Windows 2000 and XP SP2 Support Coming to an End

Those of you running older versions of Windows at your companies should know that support is about to end for two specific flavors of Microsoft's (News - Alert) operating system.

IT departments still running the 10-year-old Windows 2000 on clients or servers are hitting the end of the road for official support. Microsoft is pulling the plug on its support for Windows 2000 in another two months, specifically on July 13. This means you'll no longer be able to download security patches, hardware drivers, or other fixes to keep the OS protected and up to date. It also means the folks in Redmond will no longer offer paid support. If you need help with Windows 2000, your only option will be to use Microsoft's Knowledge Base (News - Alert) and other online help. The company is recommending that anyone still on Windows 2000 upgrade to Windows 7 for their clients and to Windows Server 2003, Server 2008, or Server 2008 R2 for their servers.

Additionally, those of you running Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) on your clients face the same situation. Your official support and available security updates will stop on July 13. But in this case, the fix is simpler. Just apply SP3 to your PCs, and that will keep you in the support loop. Also, if you're running Windows Vista, you'll want to make sure you've applied SP1 or even better SP2 since support for Vista without any service packs ended on April 13.

No matter what operating system you use on your clients and servers, you want to be sure you're running the latest service pack. Of course, that doesn't mean you should be in a rush to install that service pack as soon as it comes out. All good IT pros know you should always wait for the other guy to try out a new service pack to see if there are any problems with it. Plus, when Microsoft releases a new service pack, it does offer support for the previous service pack for 24 months. So you can bide your time and do thorough testing, but eventually you'll need to make sure your clients and servers do get updated.

As far as the OS itself, businesses who intend to stick with Windows XP SP3 for now do have another four years before support ends. Last year, XP moved from Mainstream to Extended support, which means that security fixes and other updates are still available, but Microsoft no longer provides free technical support for organizations running XP, requiring you to pay for any support incidents. All security updates and hotfixes for XP will be turned off on April 8, 2014. So that should give IT folks more than enough time to map out a migration to the latest edition of Windows.

Microsoft's Support Lifecycle page explains how a product-operating system, service pack, or application--moves from Mainstream support to Extended support to no support at all.

So, how might this news affect the business world? I can't imagine too many organizations still running Windows 2000 after ten years, at least not on a widespread basis. But I'm sure there are many still running Windows XP without SP3. A recent article in USA Today reported that Qualys (News - Alert), a company that manages computer upgrades for large and small organizations, estimates that 50 percent of the Windows XP computers still being used by businesses are running SP2.