Half Of Businesses Still Use Windows 2000

bonch writes "An AssetMetrix study shows that half of business are still running Windows 2000 four years after the release of Windows XP, and that usage of Windows 2000 has only decreased by 4% since 2003. Microsoft will officially stop supporting Windows 2000 by the end of this month, offering one last update rollup later this year. Windows XP's slower adoption illustrates Microsoft's difficulty in competing with the popularity of its own software platform, and makes it more difficult for Microsoft to convince people to upgrade when Longhorn is released late next year."

Officially?

[dsginter]

Yeah, right. [microsoft.com]

Re:But maybe not

[Anonymous Coward]

There are a lot of other reasons as well. We own licensing for XP for every workstation but still have not upgraded and I don't see it happening in the foreseeable future either. 2000 does its job and is pretty stable, why change?

Re:Officially?

[JaseOne]

Well the blurb might have been a little harsh but...

Mainstream
* Paid-per-incident support
* Free hotfix support

Is what expires next month.

Two things

[Cthefuture]

There are two main reason I have seen for not upgrading:

1. There isn't very much difference between XP and 2000. 2000 is a fairly stable platform that runs pretty much all the same software as XP. "If it ain't broke"

2. The activation stuff sucks. Even as a legal owner I find it is a huge pain in the ass. This is especially true when you upgrade a server. It's not uncommon to upgrade servers either by changing/adding hardware or just replacing the whole machine which can cause you to have to reactivate Windows. Now, it's not that hard to reactivate but it's just a stupid little thing you have to do and the machine won't work until it's done. It feels risky to upgrade machines running XP because you're not sure if everything will go smoothly because of the activation crap.

I use 2000 on my main development machine because sometimes I do have to change the hardware for testing purposes and I got tired of having to continuously reactivate Windows.

I don't know what I'm going to do if they stop supporting 2000. More reason to spend more time in Linux or OS X I guess (although technically I simply must spend some time in Windows for development purposes).

Re:Well...

[RupW]

Why doesn't MS try a subscription based scheme? A small amount for installation of the OS, and then a renewal fee each year?

They already do [microsoft.com].

Re:Speaking of XP...

[Bad to the Ben]

Here's the MS product roadmap: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=fh; %5Bln%5D;LifeWin [microsoft.com]

You might find it useful. Scroll down to the end for XP. The dates are 2006 for end of Mainstream support and 2011 for Extended.

Re:My company.

[RupW]

I'm the only IT guy, and my company uses a windows2000 server with active directory and such on a Dell. Runs fine.

Assuming you're under fifty employees, have you looked at MS's Small Business Server? For about the price of the server OS on its own you get all the big server products provided you run them all on the same box.

Granted, there's not a lot to make SBS 2003 a must-have over SBS 2000 apart from:

1. Exchange 2003's Outlook Web Access is much nicer than 2000's
2. ISA Server 2004 instead of ISA 2000 (if you get the SBS 2003 Premium edition and apply SP1)

and they're just nice-to-haves really, along with all the other Server 2003 nice-to-haves.

Old Macs hang around, too

[ewg]

Old Macs hang around, too. If staff are getting their work done on the old junk they're using, management is loathe is spend money on a replacement.

Are you kidding?

[illuminatedwax]

Do you know how many businesses use 98 still? A LOT. Many businesses are still using 95 and 98 on their old computers because they can't afford new computers. Businesses are not going to change as quickly as Microsoft wants them to. NEWS FLASH!

No plans to change from Win2k...

[Anonymous Coward]

I really don't feel like rambling on about Win2k when I really don't need to. All you need to say about Win2k is this:

It works.

I can keep the school kids out of the system, keep the system running all day, and at the end of the school year, still have a computer that's about 99% as clean as when I started using it (plus everybody knows how to use it). Even though it's five years old, it still works. And as a sysadmin, anything that really works is worth keeping.

Re:Why upgrade?

[Anonymous Coward]

You lose about 5-15% in some situations with SP2 v XP SP1. There is a few percent difference in WinXP vs 2k just in general, (though only for intel platforms new codepaths and better optimization made WinXP a perfomance neutral upgrade for AMD owners).

In general most people won't see that big a difference.

Not troll - support exists until 2010.

[cbreaker]

Like the link says, only "Mainstream" support will end. You can still get support on a per-incident basis (which isn't really that much different then before.)

Additionally, Microsoft will continue to release security fixes for Windows 2000 for several more years - they still release patches for Windows 98 now.

It won't change much for most people.

At my company, we've got several hundred servers running Windows 2000 still. IIS6 in IIS5 compatibility mode isn't perfect, and IIS6 in native mode breaks a lot of apps. And there's a ton of other little gotchas with Windows Server 2003 - Can't run Exchange 2000 on it, can't run a lot of 3rd party software, etc etc. It's not an extremely hard upgrade but like any other major upgrade it's a lot of preparation.

Re:Why upgrade?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Microsoft supported W2k for five years, which is a very long time considering a lot of businesses replace all their computers every three years.

This is unlike Redhat, which EOL'ed Red Hat 9 after less than a year it was out.

Microsoft will still release security fixes, and they have done this with 98 and NT.

Re:Officially?

[BoomerSooner]

Security hotfixes - Free to all customers through March 31, 2010

If you're running Windows 2000 Server you have till March 31, 2010 to move to whatever OS you choose. I'm personally waiting to evaluate OS X on Intel hardware. I was getting ready to port our web offerings to OS X on PPC/XServes but now I'll just wait until the new offerings hit the market. JSP here I come...

Statistical Check

[6031769]

According to the original report [assetmetrix.com], the sample only covers windows-based PCs. Therefore the headline really means that over half of the PCs which run Windows are running the Windows 2000 variant.

Re:Not only that

[Dragoon412]

In all fairness, WinXP can look pretty good, if you put some work into it [img293.echo.cx].

Re:MS are in a bit of a pickle really

[xtracto]

With the eye-candy disabled, XP is just a more up-to-date Win2K

I do not think so. Look, I am writing this from my pffice PC, which is an AMD Athlon XP processor and 512 MB RAM and a 7200 RPM HD .

At home I have a Hp Notebook with Windows XP, and a Pentium 4M processor. Same RAM, and same speed HD.

With those configs, I find the Win2K machine like 4 times faster than the WinXP machine.

I think Windows 2000 is very good, as it has [almost] EVERYTHING an OS should have, and with Windows XP Microsoft added other things that I really do not use and surely there are process[services] that are just wasting my memory/CPU.

I have even turned lots of services (with help of the black viper service config guide), but Win2000 continues running smoother.

Re:Why upgrade?

[bheer]

I don't use the MS search at all - too slow.

Yes, but for anyone not using grep for Windows or Google/MSN Desktop Search, there is a Tweak UI [microsoft.com] setting that switches XP's search back to look _exactly_ like Win2k's search.

(TweakUI's a good download to have around anyway.)

Re:Why upgrade?

[dr-suess-fan]

If you want to compare MS to RH, please use apples to apples and not apples to oranges.

You're comparing actions of RH at a time when they were trying to rapidly phase out their consumer editions. This is the orange.

The Redhat 'apple' I'm referring to is RHEL 2.1/3/4 that gets at least 3 years of support. As far as I know, RHEL 2.1 is still supported and RHEL 4 is out now.

Sorry, but FUD like this annoys me.

Re:MS lifecycle says it has to be

[spoonyfork]

According to that chart the drop dead date for support for win2k is 2010, not 2005. There is still plenty of time to procrastinate.

I've not upgraded and my breaking point is near...

[NetSettler]

I'm one of those who has not upgraded from Windows 2000 to Windows XP. It's not the software I dread, it's Microsoft's increasingly ridiculous enforcement of its own personal theory of Intellectual Property rigor. No, I'm not someone who cheats on licenses. I am meticulous about having valid licenses for all the machines in my home/office. HOWEVER, that means (a) I've paid for them and (b) I have the right number. It does NOT necessarily mean that when I have to reload a system, I have the kind of records to know whether the huge box of CD-ROM's I grab from my basement is organized enough to know that I've got the correct one of six disks. That means there's a huge chance as they get stronger with THEIR bookkeeping that one day it's going to start barfing at me about how I appear (to them) to have a disk that isn't the right one for this machine, or I appear to have two machines on the net using the same license. XP is even more strict about licenses than 2000, so I just dread their faulty software ragging on me.

Even just to install the later version(s) of Media Player, you have to agree to some awful license that lets it sniff out your machine and make its own determination (without asking for my input) about whether I'm in violation of their license policies.

And now they have other tools that are starting to do this as well.

And XP is full of "more of same", which is why I have resisted upgrading.

Why should I, a customer who believes he IS in compliance, fear these tools except because I don't trust Microsoft to implement them well and flexibly enough to do anything but screw me? Every time they are wrong, Microsoft gets another sale (or tries to) and I get no recourse. They can deny me bug fixes, upgrades, and so on based solely on their program's opinion of my license management practices.

This problem has to be worse at sites where installation is so complicated that machines are ghosted. Presumably in the ghosting case, you buy a heap of licenses, but then you copy a single image to all the different machines. Well, that's all well and good, but when you get all done, you're all apparently violators.

There's just a limit to what you can mechanically detect. And when you've got as much income as Microsoft plainly has, you need to learn to trust that most people must be paying you and not start to piss them off by treating them like they are cheaters.

They should be investing in tools that allow them to flexibly manage a sense of how many licenses you have at a site, and that don't make me dig around in my basement every time I need to do an upgrade and it wants me to find the original disk from which I installed something to prove I'm a real person. I've given them far too much real money and have been too staunch a supporter of software-for-fee to be treated this way.

Trying to force me into upgrading to a product that treats me worse by cutting support for one that does not is no way to engender my customer loyalty. Maybe if Microsoft doesn't care, it's time to start complaining to the various tools that I (again) BUY on Microsoft's platform and tell them I'm going to be jumping ship from Microsoft and that means I won't be buying their tools any more unless they run on Linux or Apple or wherever I end up. If Microsoft doesn't hear my little voice, maybe it will hear the voices of the tools that I want that are the only reason I buy from Microsoft. Maybe if I could buy Adobe InDesign or Adobe Photoshop for Linux (please don't tell me Gimp is good enough, because it's just not), I wouldn't have to buy Microsoft at all.

One reason for xp over 2k

[mikapc]

I still run windows win2k pro at home and plan to remain with it until new programs stop supporting it. At work though I've had to set up machines with xp. XP out the box default settings are incredibly annoying but I have to say if you take the time to configure one machine and then make an image of it you can make it even more functional then win2k. I set all the layout looks back to classic mode, installed tweak ui power toys, including the iso recorder, so now all systems have built in burning capacity for standard data as well as iso's. In addition I've read win2k doesn't support hyperthreading while xp does so if your machine runs new intel p4's you're better off with XP, at home though I still run an overclocked athlon xp so win2k is just as good. I still think win2k is a little less bloated and if you're after maximum speed one should go with setting up win2k over xp, but with 2.8p4's and above the speed hit you take with xp is negligble, and with hyperthreading I've noticed the 2.8ghz dell optiplex's are faster with basic tasks then my o/c athlon 2100 at 2.2Ghz.

XP Professional

[doombob]

The best situation that I have had in domain environments is Windows 2003 Server with XP Professional Workstation. The XP Pro machines join the domains and can access the Exchange server with less issues than anyother setup I have worked with. Maybe I'm not doing things right, or maybe I'm a moron, but Windows 2000 machines have some issues loging in due to searching for the DNS. And in situations where there is a Windows 2000 Server, there are sometimes problems with the workstations using Exchange.

Re:Why upgrade?

[Nevyn]

From http://www.redhat.com/software/subscriptions.html [redhat.com] ...

"Access support you can trust - Deploy confidently with the backing of Red Hat experts. Each release is supported for seven years."

Use every other version of Windows

[randomErr]

I have used Win 3.11(with patched), 98 (SP2), and I'm happy with 2000(SP2). So hopefully Longhorn will follow suit and be just as good in inovations and stability.