It is now ten years old Windows 2000 is still in business and public institutions around – as recently as last week, signed a very slow Windows 2000 computer in a hospital in Switzerland – but from 13 July is Windows 2000 described as very dead.
That date ended namely Microsoft’s Extended Support for Windows 2000 that provides access to critical security updates. And thus it becomes very hard for the last , stubborn Windows 2000 users to continue using the operating system.
The NT- based Windows 2000 came just after the millennium and was the last operating system from Microsoft, which was exclusively targeted at professional users. At the time, Microsoft is still selling the DOS -based Windows 98 (SE) and ME (Millennium Edition) to private users.
Windows 2000 was actually a little success for Microsoft with one million licenses sold in the first month , and it may be the reason why the software company has chosen to keep the operating system so long – first with five years of Mainstream Support and then with five years of Extended Support.
First with the successor of Windows XP two years later could Microsoft bring together the private and professional users on the same operating system, but XP also came in a jumble of different versions (PC , tablet PC, media center , 32 -bit, 64 – bit) and many professional chose to be at Windows 2000.
The fourth and final service pack for Windows 2000 came in the middle of 2003 and the latest Update Rollup with security updates came a few years later.
So computers with Windows 2000 lacks new drivers and support for many new programs – even Microsoft’s own Internet Explorer 7 requires Vista or XP , so you can only use the heretical IE6 under XP.
Microsoft has even started a campaign to get rid of IE6 , and it can obviously be applied also for Windows 2000 that is still installed on a few percent of all corporate computers. From next month it’s over with security updates for Windows 2000.
At the same time also ends support for Windows XP with Service Pack 2 and XP SP3 users are provided with updates until 2014.
