Windows XP SP2 Support Ends Tomorrow 251
Vectormatic writes "As can be seen on the product page for Windows XP, support for SP2 ends tomorrow, while the majority of Windows XP users still haven't upgraded to SP3. This could open up millions of users/businesses to exploitation, since security updates for SP2 will stop coming in while security fixes to SP3 may clue hackers in to vulnerabilities."
Note (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Cool (Score:3, Informative)
Blue, Silver, AND Green [wikipedia.org]!
You get the best from Fisher-Price! Er... Microsoft.
Citation on the 50% number (Score:5, Informative)
http://laws.qualys.com/2010/05/end-of-life-for-windows-xp-sp.html [qualys.com]
That article states SP2 is still used on 50% of XP machines
Re:Is SP3 the one with the bigger GBs? (Score:4, Informative)
I think the OP is referring to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL7yD-0pqZg [youtube.com]
Re:xp and _win2k_! (Score:2, Informative)
Microsoft support lifecycle practices (Score:4, Informative)
I wish ... Linux supported a base system for ten years.
Linux isn't a person or organization and thus can't support anything.
The best organization I know of (in terms of length of support for a given Linux configuration) is Red Hat, which supports RHEL for seven years. Still not as good as Microsoft's ten year policy.
Microsoft will support you even longer, if you pay for a custom support agreement. I'm told prices start around $40K.
I suppose, for that price, you could pay someone to maintain your Linux configuration for you. You do have the source code. But you'd have to start doing it sooner.
$1.20 says they'll continue releasing critical updates as they've done for a while for "retired" service packs in the past.
Can you cite specific examples? In my experience, support for Microsoft products starts to be curtailed near end-of-life, not extended past it. NT4, 2000, XP have all had security vulnerabilities discovered which Microsoft did not fix, but which were fixed for later releases of Windows. MS09-048 for 2000/XP. Another I can't recall right now for NT4. Yah, they had their reasons, but the fact remains that once the successor products arrive, support starts to degrade for the old releases.
Microsoft base system release lifecycle (Score:5, Informative)
I wish MS updated their base system more than once every 10 years.
Win95 (1995) -> Win98 (1998) [3 years] -> Win98SE (1999) [1 year] -> WinME (2000) [1 year]
NT 3.1 (1993) -> NT 3.5 (1994) [1 year] -> NT 4.0 (1996) [2 years] -> Win 2000 (2000) [4 years] -> XP (2001) [1 year] -> Vista (2006) [5 years] -> Win 7 (2009) [3 years]
Even the longest release drought, XP->Vista, was 6 years, not 10. The mean is 2 years; the median 2.5 years.
(I detest FUD, even FUD directed at a target I happen to dislike.)
Re:Note (Score:1, Informative)
Device makers largely skipped XP64 because the driver model changed drastically between XP and Vista, and XP64 had a vanishingly small marketshare and was released not particularly long before Vista was. If you want a 64-bit operating system, XP64 was always a poor choice.
If XP SP2 isn't supported, why have the copyrights (Score:0, Informative)
If XP SP2 isn't supported, why have the copyrights? Microsoft isn't making any money off it. Microsoft don't WANT to make money off it. Microsoft don't want to have to pay to fix problems in their code. So why are they refusing to let anyone else do it?
If someone breaks the copyrights of XP SP2 or earlier, Microsoft has lost NOTHING since they aren't selling or supporting it even any more.
Re:Astonishing (Score:1, Informative)
The Windows installation writes a new master boot record. That is surely an anoyance but totally harmles. And your favorite boot manager should be able to fix this with a single command.
Re:xp and _win2k_! (Score:3, Informative)
Also, there seems to be no updates for W2K SP4 for tomorrow as well that I read. :( So last month's updates were the last ones!
Re:Note (Score:3, Informative)
XP x64 is really Server 2003 "Workstation Edition" - it's compiled from the Server 2003 code, thus uses the same patches (and has the same lifecycle) as Server 2003, not XP.
Re:Astonishing (Score:4, Informative)
Windows XP SP3 requires 1GB of memory in the system, SP2 required about 512MB. This is not mentioned anywhere in the SP3 notes that I could find.
That's because it's a figure you made up by yourself. Without any third party tools, the system requirements of Windows XP remain the same as when RTM rolled out in 2001. 64 MB bare minimum (which means it will basically boot), 128MB recommended (which means it will boot in under a day). I have several PIII machines with 256MB RAM that hum along with XP-SP3 quite well. The problem with requirements isn't so much Windows as third party software. Websites have richer and richer content (flash, Javascript) that can take an old machine to it's knees, on-access AV solutions considered "light" on new machines can have a huge performance hit on an older machine. Yet Office 2007, and even Office 2010 still perform better on these machines than Open Office.
Re:xp and _win2k_! (Score:4, Informative)
Why'd they freak out?
It's not going to be receiving any updates from now on, including security updates.
Re:Noob question. (Score:1, Informative)
That would be http://winehq.org/ [winehq.org]
Your site is about actual drinkable wine.
Re:No biggie, it still keeps running (Score:3, Informative)
By "secure environment" I presume you mean "without network connectivity"? Because otherwise, it just isn't.
Re:the 5billion inthe bank is not enough (Score:5, Informative)
Erm, you don't have to pay anything for SP3. It's a free download and the min spec hasn't increased from SP2 so you don't need to upgrade any hardware.
If your apps still require XP SP2 to function then you've got bigger issues than Microsoft dropping support for it.
Re:Oh Noes!!! (Score:3, Informative)
This is especially stupid since software has no moving parts to wear out, and is one reason I hate Windows and love Linux. When support stops for a Windows distro you're out of luck, but Linux support is always there.
Bitrot happens even on linux. Just try and use an old version of Linux from 2001 or so on period hardware. You won't be able to take advantage of linux's biggest advantage, the software repositories. Try and use them and you'll pull in an updated distro. You really do have to constantly update a Linux box, but the updates are free and automatic so it's not so onerous.
What's really bad is when you have an old piece of software that was written for an old version of GCC. Newer GCCs are more strict, so you may not be able to compile it with modern GCC without some serious hacking. And the libraries a binary needs are probably no longer in the repositories, so you may have to hunt them down, manually install them and do trickery with ld_library_path to get it to run.
As much as I prefer Linux to Windows, it has its share of backwards compatibility problems too.
Re:Oh Noes!!! (Score:1, Informative)
I have an old laptop that dies when you install SP3 on it. I don't know what the issue is, it just hangs after installing SP3. I have installed WinXP from scratch from a variety of install media some w/ SP2 slipstreamed and some without. I have installed XP and then tried to install SP3 before installing any drivers or programs that might be conflicting with it. I have tried everything. For some unknown reason SP3 kills my laptop. makes it just hang to the point where I have to manually power cycle it.
So I am stuck with XP SP2 on that laptop. I have a lot of Windows apps that I need for school plus there are some school websites that I need to access that requires IE so I am stuck with Windows on it; Linux is not an option there. And the laptop is way too old for Windows 7.
My point is that there are some of us stuck on SP2 through no fault of our own.
Re:Oh Noes!!! (Score:2, Informative)