Windows XP SP1 Support Ends Tuesday

tophee writes "ZDNet reports that support for Windows XP SP1 and SP1a will be ending this coming Tuesday. From the article: 'Microsoft will end support for Windows XP Service Pack 1 and SP1a on Tuesday, leaving people no option but to upgrade to Service Pack 2 if they wish to continue to receive crucial components, including security software.' Colin Barker of ZDNet notes, 'There's little reason for anyone to still be running SP1; SP2 contained a range of improvements to XP's security.'"

Comments

Re:And once again... (you can say that again!)

[AndyCater]

Debian Stable - release cycle on about 18 months and support for up to a year after that. Debian repositories and archives have versions back about ten years - so you should always be able to upgrade. Debian testing and unstable are updated at least daily - stable only when there are security fixes. If you mean "paid for" enterprise Linux then Red Hat is now at 7 years or so support - but stuff changes with the interim updates as far as I can see.

Re:WGA

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't need to install WGA to get SP2.

Re:Heh

[bmo]

Why don't you look for yourself?

The latest 2.4 version of the Linux kernel is: 2.4.33.3 2006-08-31 20:20 UTC
The latest prepatch for the 2.4 Linux kernel tree is: 2.4.34-pre4 2006-10-02 20:45 UTC

Seems pretty recent to me.

http://www.kernel.org/

--
BMO

Re:One reason is disk space

[ChronoReverse]

You can slipstream service packs into the Windows CD.

http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/windowsxp_sp2 _slipstream.asp shows you how.

Re:Dialup

[bmo]

Ok, I'm assuming you're joking, but for those who do _not_ know that you can bypass the Windows update site and simply download and burn to CD so your friends don't have to suffer, go HERE:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?Fa milyId=049C9DBE-3B8E-4F30-8245-9E368D3CDB5A&displa ylang=en

Actually, if your friends are running Windows, they _are_ suffering.

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BMO

Re:The problem

[quentin_quayle]

"Are you saying a bug can't be a feature?!"

With Microsoft it can!

And a "feature" can be a bug. One reason the holdouts have avoided SP2 is that Microsoft intentionally degraded the networking with SP2. Yes it's fixable, but not perfectly, and I'm not sure I care to bother with it.

This is one of the long-planned milestones on my migration to another OS (references to which have become a cliché in this connection).

Many of the fixes aren't even needed for a lean-and-mean XP configuration, so the time to an "upgrade or exposure" choice may be longer than this month.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

You should be fired

[toadlife]

I hope you're just trolling, though I've met many IT people like you, so I'm thinking you may be serious.

"I'm an a large site that's running XP SP1 on all of quite a few thousand machines and I'd just like to say that one week notice of termination of support is ridiculous.

Microsoft announced the cutoff date for SP1 a long, long, long time ago. In fact, I'm pretty sure it was known before SP2 was even released.

Have fun rushing out SP2. You only have yourself to blame.

Re:The problem

[suv4x4]

The problem with Microsoft is that they never separate bug fixes from feature additions. So either you stay vulnerable or you eat more and more of their junk.

I didn't want to move to Firefox 1.5. It worked slower and ate far mre RAM on my machines.
But alas, few exploits later, I updated.

Because Firefox 1.0 support ended the moment 1.5 was out. Let's see for how long Firefox 1.5 will be supported when the official 2.0 release is out.

Let me guess: 0 days.

They'll prise Win2K from my cold dead hands.

[burnttoy]

What can I say. It works, it works well and most drivers (I've yet to find a broken one) work well thanks to WDM.

I shove a decent firewall on the thing, ditch IE and install my apps of choice and I'm away.

The only thing missing is Cleartype fonts.

Best version of Windows ever.