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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."
Well the blurb might have been a little harsh but...
Mainstream
* Paid-per-incident support
* Free hotfix support
Is what expires next month.
In the drops - An Aussie's musings on all things cycling
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).
The ratio of people to cake is too big
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.
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!
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
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.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
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.
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.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
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 setting that switches XP's search back to look _exactly_ like Win2k's search.
(TweakUI's a good download to have around anyway.)
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