It only feels like yesterday that Active Directory and
Windows 2000 were released to market. But the 30th of June
sees Windows 2000 SP4 moving from a standard mainstream
product to extended support. This means that warranty
support, design changes, and new features will no
longer be supported by Microsoft. However, you will
still get security updates for SP4 up until Windows
2k hits retirement in 2010.
The other significant news from Microsoft is that IE 5
and 6 will only be supported on Windows SP4; this
includes security updates, and Microsoft has no plans
to release IE 7 for the Win2k platform.
All in all I recommend anyone running Windows 2k to
upgrade to SP4 as soon as possible. From my experience,
the update is a painless one and shouldn’t cause any
issues.
Details on Microsoft product lifecycle can be found here.
[Andrew Smith]