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

Upgrades?

[adamofgreyskull]

Once a product ceases to be supported, does "migration" to a newer product from it become unsupported?

Joe ServicePack is perplexed...

[jkrise]

Poor Joe has never ever received any support from Microsoft for any of his licensed, legal Windows or Office software. How does this affect him?

Factually speaking, NT4 was the last stable, fast and useful (as in drivers, functionality etc.) OS from MS, that offered a semblance of security.

Anyways, what this means is we have to support Windows ourselves - any difference? I'm more conerned that Citrix stopped support for NT in Metaframe XP - those idiots! For no obvious technical reasons...

Re:Joe ServicePack is perplexed...

[Matrix272]

I can't see how anybody can say that the security in NT4 was enough, especially compared to newer OS's. And if you want to get all technical about it, since Joe ServicePack has never received any support from Microsoft, then he's running Windows NT4 without any service packs... since the service packs have to be developed by Microsoft. Keeping that in mind, I'd say Joe ServicePack probably has a long and hard road ahead of him to upgrade to an operating system developed in the better part of the past decade. I wish him luck.

Re:Primary link at Microsoft

[madman101]

Those are for desktop operating systems only. BTW, the extensions were announced and heavily covered in the media back in February. "Apparently" announced? Where have you people been?

sad to see it go?

[Lumpy]

Funny, I dont think any of my NT4 critical systems are going to go anywhere.

as far as support no longer available, Big deal. I can get 3rd party support.

My NT4 servers are going no-where... they all server me very well with 99.9% Uptime and each decoding 24 different MPEG2 DVD quality video streams at once on a Pentium 166.

Until the vendor writes Windows 2000 drivers for these very high end MPEG cards, NT4 is the de-facto standard in cable tv headends for many more years.

sorry, but this is a non-issue for most of us... it doens make the OS magically dissappear.

Re:We still have NT4 servers...

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Er, no. This isn't like a car, this is an OS. There is no Consumer Product Safety Commission or a National Transportation Department looking over M$'s shoulder.

I think it's completely irresponsible, of course. Most meaningful systems have an ROI measured in years. Once the thing starts paying for itself, it sucks to have to yank it because it can't be repaired anymore.

Hell, what's the average lifespan of unix terminal, or a Mini? How about a Mainframe? These things would live for YEARS. We had a System 36 that operated our finance department from 1982 to 1999. That was replaced by an AS/400 that we are probably going to get another 10-15 years out of.

People, business is business. We are not put on this earth to keep the unscrupulous and wasteful fat and happy.

Re:The devil you know

[EvilTwinSkippy]

I have a whitebox I built at home, and continually tweak when I have a few bucks to burn. It has an ATI all-in-wonder that I use to throw my playstation on the screen.

We upgraded from 98SE to XP because I wanted an OS that could walk and chew gum at the same time. Let me tell you, mistake, mistake, mistake. Anything that uses the 3d accelleration crashes the system randomly. Which defeats the purpose of having an athlon-XP to work on computer animation now doesn't it?

It's always dual booted, and I have finally gotten the Linux side so stable, my wife only boots into Windows to use M$ office. I have open office on the system, but she keeps mumbling something about layout. She like it because it boots from power switch to login, to KDE finished loading in 30 seconds. I'm digressing...

I never thought I would see the day, but I actually have better driver support under Linux than XP for my machine. I have the firewire card working, with software to OPERATE the firewire card. My printers work without having to reboot to clear a printer-error condition. (A bug in the USB driver for XP.) My DVD playback and surround sound are perfect.

And all this without having to drop another dime on hardware.

Re:The devil you know

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

You really should have a company-wide standard and that probably should be windows 2000.

Unfortunately, in a small company like ours, that simple isn't financially viable. Even if it were, not all of our PCs are used for the same purposes, so we wouldn't want them all to be the same, or even necessarily run the same basic software.

By the way, we develop software that ships on more than a dozen different platforms, including several flavours of Windows, several *nix variations, older non-UNIX'd MacOS versions and more. We're well aware of the strengths and limitations of these platforms relative to one another.

NT 4 is considerably less stable than 2000.

Several of my colleagues would disagree with you, from direct personal experience. For standard networked Dell boxes running Windows+Office and nothing else, sure. From personal experience, Win2K is generally more stable and the one they got right. But certainly for some machines, particularly those with any "unusual" hardware, it's quite common for NT4 to be more stable than 2000.

I would also tell you XP guy to turn off the auto-restart on blue screen so that he can actually see what it is saying.

I'm sorry, you misunderstand me. There is no blue screen. The system either locks up or resets, immediately. This is rare with the better Windows versions, but quite possible technically, and happening with monotonous regularity on this particular system. Or did you think that highly privileged code was immune from bugs that screw up the state of the floating point unit, and device drivers never set threads to run at the dangerously high priorities allowed by the Windows API? ;-)

Okay, tar and feather me, but . . . .

[LazloToth]

Yeah, NT is not *nix. Yeah, NT isn't a lot of things. But I've worked with it since SP1, and, you know, once you get used to it, you can get a lot of productivity out of it. So much depends on drivers and, of course, program code. These days, NT lacks some refinement. So does Linux, for that matter. Nonetheless, after 6 1/2 service packs, NT delivered (and continues to deliver) a fair amount of bang for your hardware buck. In some ways, it is refreshing to use a product that is not weighed down with useless features. Our remaining NT servers, running on Compaq Proliant 1600 hardware, are fine producers. And contrary to myth, they do NOT have to be rebooted every day, every week, or even every month. This isn't a Microsoft ad - - I'm leading the charge away from MS products at my company. But I will give some credit where it's due.