Support, Windows XP, Windows 2000

Deadline fast aproaching on End of Support, Windows XP, Windows 2000 and older Server products

Tuesday, 13 July 2010, should be marked up, highlighted and double underlined in your diaries if your organisation uses Windows XP SP2, Windows 2000 Professional and Windows Server 2000.

From this date, Microsoft will end support for these versions of our products as part of our normal product life cycle policy. End of supports means there will be no more security updates for these versions*.

By now, Microsoft strongly recommends that:

• You should have migrated to newer, supported versions of these products; or
• You have a plan to migrate soon; or
• You have investigated and accepted the risk associated with using unsupported products.

What are the risks?
Unsupported and unpatched environments are more vulnerable to security risks. Service packs include all previously released security updates at the time the service packs were released. They can also include additional security features, mitigations, or changes to default settings to help protect users. Microsoft provides complimentary security patches for supported products, but not for unsupported products.

Additionally, in the event that you encounter an issue/outage in your environment on an unsupported product, our engineers may not be able to help resolve this until you have upgraded to a supported level.

What are the options?

• For Windows XP, there are two upgrade options: either deploy the latest Service Pack, SP3 or a more recent supported version of the OS, such as Windows 7.
• For Windows 2000 Server, the upgrade options are Windows Server 2003 R2 or Windows Server 2008 R2. Windows Server 2008 R2 will be supported until 2018 and offers many advantages, particularly in the areas of virtualization, security and manageability.