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Windows XP SP2 Support Ends Tomorrow
Vectormatic writes "As can be seen on the product page for Windows XP, support for SP2 ends tomorrow, while the majority of Windows XP users still haven't upgraded to SP3. This could open up millions of users/businesses to exploitation, since security updates for SP2 will stop coming in while security fixes to SP3 may clue hackers in to vulnerabilities."
It should be noted that XP SP2 x64 has support until whenever XP SP3 x86 runs out. There is no XP SP3 x64
http://laws.qualys.com/2010/05/end-of-life-for-windows-xp-sp.html
That article states SP2 is still used on 50% of XP machines
People, what a bunch of bastards
I think the OP is referring to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL7yD-0pqZg
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
I wish ... Linux supported a base system for ten years.
Linux isn't a person or organization and thus can't support anything.
The best organization I know of (in terms of length of support for a given Linux configuration) is Red Hat, which supports RHEL for seven years. Still not as good as Microsoft's ten year policy.
Microsoft will support you even longer, if you pay for a custom support agreement. I'm told prices start around $40K.
I suppose, for that price, you could pay someone to maintain your Linux configuration for you. You do have the source code. But you'd have to start doing it sooner.
$1.20 says they'll continue releasing critical updates as they've done for a while for "retired" service packs in the past.
Can you cite specific examples? In my experience, support for Microsoft products starts to be curtailed near end-of-life, not extended past it. NT4, 2000, XP have all had security vulnerabilities discovered which Microsoft did not fix, but which were fixed for later releases of Windows. MS09-048 for 2000/XP. Another I can't recall right now for NT4. Yah, they had their reasons, but the fact remains that once the successor products arrive, support starts to degrade for the old releases.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I wish MS updated their base system more than once every 10 years.
Win95 (1995) -> Win98 (1998) [3 years] -> Win98SE (1999) [1 year] -> WinME (2000) [1 year]
NT 3.1 (1993) -> NT 3.5 (1994) [1 year] -> NT 4.0 (1996) [2 years] -> Win 2000 (2000) [4 years] -> XP (2001) [1 year] -> Vista (2006) [5 years] -> Win 7 (2009) [3 years]
Even the longest release drought, XP->Vista, was 6 years, not 10. The mean is 2 years; the median 2.5 years.
(I detest FUD, even FUD directed at a target I happen to dislike.)
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Windows XP SP3 requires 1GB of memory in the system, SP2 required about 512MB. This is not mentioned anywhere in the SP3 notes that I could find.
That's because it's a figure you made up by yourself. Without any third party tools, the system requirements of Windows XP remain the same as when RTM rolled out in 2001. 64 MB bare minimum (which means it will basically boot), 128MB recommended (which means it will boot in under a day). I have several PIII machines with 256MB RAM that hum along with XP-SP3 quite well. The problem with requirements isn't so much Windows as third party software. Websites have richer and richer content (flash, Javascript) that can take an old machine to it's knees, on-access AV solutions considered "light" on new machines can have a huge performance hit on an older machine. Yet Office 2007, and even Office 2010 still perform better on these machines than Open Office.
Why'd they freak out?
It's not going to be receiving any updates from now on, including security updates.
Erm, you don't have to pay anything for SP3. It's a free download and the min spec hasn't increased from SP2 so you don't need to upgrade any hardware.
If your apps still require XP SP2 to function then you've got bigger issues than Microsoft dropping support for it.