Support for Microsoft Windows versions during 2010
During the coming year, a number of versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system will go out of support. Microsoft is working with its partners to let customers and consumers know of the risk of running unsupported products in their business and home computing environments.
Windows 2000 Professional and Windows 2000 Server are approaching 10 years since their launch and both products will go out of support on 13 July, 2010.
Windows XP was launched back in 2001. While support for the product will continue for a few more years, Service Pack 2 will go out of support on 13 July, 2010. From that date onwards, Microsoft will no longer support or provide free security updates for Windows XP SP2.
Finally, support for Windows Vista RTM will end on 13 April 2010.
There are a number of risks that arise from the end of support for a software product. Firstly unsupported and unpatched environments are particularly vulnerable to security risks. Microsoft’s service packs include all previously released security updates at the time the service packs were released. They can also include additional security features, mitigations, or changes to default settings to protect users. Microsoft provides free security patches for supported products, but not for unsupported products.
Secondly, problem resolution services are generally available for supported products. However, in the event that a customer encounters an issue/outage in their environment on an unsupported product, our engineers may not be able to help resolve the issue until the customer has upgraded to a supported level.
There are a range of actions that customers and consumers can take to avoid or mitigate these risks. Naturally we are encouraging customers and consumers to consider upgrading their software.
Obviously it remains an option for a customer to keep using software that is out of support. In these cases the customer will need to accept the risk of not receiving security patches and not having access to problem resolutionsupport forproducts.
Full details of the product support lifecycles for Microsoft’s products are available on the Microsoft website: https://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle.
Full details on the ending of support for Windows 2000 and Windows XP are also available at:
https://support.microsoft.com/win2000 and https://support.microsoft.com/winxp