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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.'"
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.
They should be forced to strictly separate the two.
It makes sense as people have had a long time to test their apps against XP SP2 and report bugs to MS. Of course if SP2 breaks anything and you're a paying customer then I can understand why you'd want to stay on SP1 otherwise SP2 offers some advanages.
I think things like WGA are being forced on people whatever version they're running so that's no reason not to upgrade.
When the upgrade is included in the initial purchase cost then this is fine. If they dropped support for XP altogether then that would have been bad but just think of SP2 as an update.
Anyway I hate MS versioning schemes, why service pack why not call it a point release? They also love weird names for their beta software I remember the IE7 beta 2 preview refresh (which was the second pre-release before beta 2)
You haven't worked in corporate IT have you?
4 years for some companies is about the time they start the *rollout*.
If take a sample of random customers the majority of Windows users are on Windows 2000 (6 years old!).. a sizable chunk of 2003 now as people begin to roll it out, very little XP (that was skipped for the most part).
We still have NT4 customers.
4 years is nothing.
(You get the same with other OSs - nobody is running Solaris 10 yet (only 1 query about it in the last year), lots of Solaris 8 and Solaris 9.. Even other stuff.. Oracle 8 is predominant even though Oracle themselves don't support it any more).