Good-bye Windows 2000 and XP SP2 – Hello Windows 7
Time to say good-bye
Believe it or not, until Tuesday, Windows 2000 was still a supported operating system as far as Microsoft was concerned. Starting yesterday, however, Windows 2000 and Windows XP Service Pack 2 officially got dragged into the recycle bin as Microsoft ended support. What this means is that the company will no longer provide new security fixes or provide any technical support. If you do want to keep using one of these operating systems, you are on your own.
If you are still using Windows 2000, you might want to consider that it looked obsolete as long as five years ago. As for Windows XP SP2 (the service pack update Microsoft issued in 2004), keep in mind that Microsoft released XP SP3 a little over two years ago and will only continue to support it under what the company calls “extended support” (patches for vulnerabilities) through April 2014.
It may be time for a change.
If you’re hiding in the shadows, still on Windows 2000 or even on XP because you were dreading Windows Vista, it’s now safe to come out. We’ve been running Windows 7 on multiple machines here since its launch and it’s an entirely different breed of operating system. While we’ve come up with a few things that won’t work (XP Power Toys for one), those are the exceptions, not the rule. We’ve found Windows 7 very user friendly, easy to use and manage, and a worthy successor to the venerable Windows XP platform.
David M. Goldes is the president of Basex.
July 19th, 2010 11:19
Yep… moved to Windows 7 myself and it was the smoothest such move I ever made; and the OS is solid and powerful, even if I do disagree with some design decisions. On the whole, highly recommended.
Still, a tip of the hat to the late Windows XP… a long lasting, user friendly and reliable system, more so than any that preceded it (and than the one that tried to replace it) from the good folks at Redmond.