Microsoft Pulls Plug for Support on NT4

seymansey writes "According to Neowin.net and News.com, Microsoft has apparently announced that as of the end of June, support for the now aging NT4 OS will be pulled. NT4 Server users have until the end of 2004 for support. Windows 98 users will be the next on the list for axed support too. Of course, Microsoft will still provide its knowledge base, but we wont see any more patches, etc. developed for the OS. After 7 years, it's kind of sad to see NT4 go."

Comments

Primary link at Microsoft

[LinuxParanoid]

A full description of Microsoft's end-of-support, end-of-life policies, including dates for *all* it's OSes, can be found here.

--LP

kinda sad...

[imag0]

...After 7 years, it's kind of sad to see NT4 go.

After spending two years in MA phone support for NT on laptops I would have to say I am happy the damn thing is finally dead.
Installing NT on anything was time intensive, installing drivers had to go in a particular order or it turned that hardware into a doorstop:

imag0: "You mean to tell me you installed the video drivers before you installed card services and your ethernet drivers?"
Client, quivering after spending the past three hours reloading NT on a laptop: "Uh, yeah."
imag0: "Ok, pull out your boot diskettes again and see if we can repair install..."

A long running joke in laptop support was that NT meant "Not Today". And it was true. Repair installs didn't. Service Control Manager (SCM) was only there to throw cryptic, useless errors at users just long enough to generate support calls and let's not get into how hard Adobe Acrobat and SP4 clusterfucked in some Trident configurations.

Glad it's dead. No love lost here. Burn your cd's and feel happy its gone the way of win 3.11 and MS Bob.

Re:We still have NT4 servers...

[tsetem]

If you upgrade from NT4, do it right. Use Samba.

The latest version of Samba even allows you to set up your Samba server to be a PDC, and directly migrate your users & groups from an already functioning NT Domain.

Other MS lifecycle links

[LinuxParanoid]

Good point. Here's a better lifecycle link at Microsoft, which includes it's Windows server products and a bunch of other server products. For Office and other MS products, you can try this link.

--LP, who is 'journal whoring', not karma whoring thank you very much ;-)

Ctrl-Alt-Del

[jpmorgan]

The login sequence (ctrl-alt-del) is there for a very particular purpose - it's an important security feature.

Since no user-program can grab ctrl-alt-del keystrokes (yay x86), forcing the user to hit c-a-d before they login proves that the login dialog is actually the system login dialog, and not some trojan somebody wrote to collect usernames and passwords.

Re:The devil you know

[nuggetman]

Windows XP resets without warning because that's the default behavior on the blue screen of death. To make it show the BSOD and possibly track down the problem

Start > Control Panel > System
Advanced Tab
Startup and Reovery settings
Uncheck "Automatically restart" under System Failure

Re:The devil you know

[necrognome]

Actually, 98SE is 32-bit with 16-bit legacy support.
see here.

For many programmers, a topic of immediate interest will be how to transport existing applications originally written for the 16-bit Windows 3.x (Win16) to the 32-bit Windows 98 and Windows NT (Win32) environments. Fortunately, such conversions, although sometimes tedious, can be relatively simple.

Because both Windows 3.x and 98/95/NT follow the same general structural format, use the same messaging systems, and employ the same resource elements, the overall structure being moved from Windows 3.x to 98/95/NT does not change. For the most part, existing Windows 3.x applications will run directly under Windows 98/95/NT without requiring recompilation for the 32-bit environment.