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Microsoft announced this week that they will stop supporting Windows XP service pack 2 and Windows 2000 on July 13 as reported by USAToday. Microsoft usually offers 5 years of support for an operating system and 5 years of extended support so the time has wound down for XP SP2 and 2000.
This announcement could be a pain for many people because it is estimated that 50% of Windows XP machines in use by businesses are running service pack 2. While the task of updating tons of SP2 machines may be daunting, it is better than leaving them be. They become sitting ducks for hackers and malware as reported: Infected PCs in corporate settings are in high demand by cyber gangs who place them in networks, or botnets, of thousands of other infected PCs used to spread spam, steal data, hijack online bank accounts and shut down websites for extortion or political reasons.
It is estimated that home users are generally better about having machines with service pack 3 because they often have auto updates enabled. However, I have seen plenty of home computers come on the bench with only SP2 at my job at Call That Girl so there will still be lots of SP2 computers coming into repair shops that cater to home users. The official Microsoft recommendation is to upgrade to Windows 7 but the other option is of course using Windows Update to get XP SP3 or just downloading it from Microsoft. Windows 2000 isn’t so lucky, it looks like its time is up for good.
XP SP3’s day isn’t so far off either, and I can’t imagine MS will put out another service pack. It’ll be nice to finally have the majority if users moving on–just like it was nice when IE6 started becoming a rarity.
Who is still using XP? The OS is over 10 years old. I’ve got a machine running Vista and another on Win7, both doing very well.
So many people still use XP even though Win 7 and even Vista are way more secure. I hope that with MS dropping support it gives incentive to upgrade.
@wekebu – People with older machines, and there are loads of them around, are still running XP, as it was the OE software on their machines, and even with a RAM upgrade their machines generally haven’t got the guts to run Win7
Many people still like the stability of XP over vista, and the horrors of vista’s release plauged it in the general populices mind even today. I still have customers come in wanting to downgrade to XP from vista. XP is still offered on some netbooks as well. It will be interesting to see what MS does, i think this is akin to the windows 98 to XP transition (though i was very young and not really a tech then).
One of my relatives uses Windows 200 as a server, and lots of my family uses Windows XP. It just kind of stuck. Besides, we usually replace a computer when we NEED to. Me and one of my relatives are computer savvy, so we do our own repairs if we can. If we need a new one, it is usually still Windows XP, though.
Don’t panic folks…just upgrade to SP3 and you will be good to 2014.
XP will be remembered as a great OS. I’ve got 3 PC’s on the bench now with clients wanting to go back to XP. People love it.