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Important news from Microsoft.

Support for NT 4 ending December 31 2004. 

You need to upgrade to XP on the desktop and Server 2003 for your servers.

Microsoft will begin the process of dropping all Windows NT 4.0 support at the end of June 2004, leaving thousands of Canadian users seeking  new operating systems or planning to deal with the changes.

A number of other widely deployed platforms have been dropped by Microsoft in the past few years, including DOS, Windows 3.x, Windows 95 and NT 3.5, with Windows 98 soon to follow.

On the desktop right now as of July 1st, NT Workstation 4.0 users will only gain access to self-help online forums.  No telephone support, updates, fixes or security patches will be issued and the only means of extended support will be via a private contract.  As this is usually an expensive option, it will force most buyers to seek an alternative system. i.e. upgrade to Windows XP.  

Windows 98 was scheduled follow suit on January 16th 2004, but gained a reprieve, but, Windows NT Server 4.0 will lose all Microsoft support at the end of 2004.  All will have online support to patches and downloads for a year after the mainstream support ends.  Security hotfix support will end, online self-help material will be available at Microsoft through December 31 2005.

Microsoft stated on its website: Starting July 1 2003, Microsoft will no longer accept support calls or hotfix requests on Windows NT Workstation 4.0, and has announced the final patch for NT 4.0 will be SP 6a, written in 1999.  There will be no SP 7.

Customers who want additional support on Windows NT 4.0 are advised to contact their Microsoft account representative for "custom support options".  These are private contracts that typically cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and are in fact a negotiation between the customer and Microsoft according to how long it will take them to upgrade to at least Server 2000.

Some industry watchers maintained that the forced changes are ill-timed and exploitative.  However, others were more positive.  We believe Microsoft is keen to get people better security and Windows Server 2003 offers better cost of ownership than NT 4.0.  Given the escalation of security incidents, we predict that if you continue to run your business on NT 4.0 you run the risk of  having a virus or worm stop your business in it's tracks.  Any new or particularly dangerous virus will not have a hotfix issued from Microsoft.   It is highly probable that after December 31st 2004 if you choose not to migrate you will be gambling with your businesses future.

Your need to install XP Service Pack 2.

Almost all the features of SP2, and certainly all of the most important ones, concern security in some way, shape, or form.

After months of tweaking and testing as well as several well-publicized delays, XP SP2 is finally here, and, following a long standing Microsoft tradition, it adds features and capabilities that would at first glance seem to obviate the need for many independent utilities.  However, as has been the case with previous updates, the operating system enhancements raise the baseline functionality without necessarily providing all the capabilities of third-party software.

No matter how you slice it, SP2 is a substantial download that will have even broadband connections working overtime.  The size of the complete soup-to-nuts installation is a whopping 266MB and will munch through over 900MB of space, nearly a GigaByte, during the installation process.  Any Microsoft network not running Server 2000 or Server 2003 (Active Directory enabled) with XP SP2 workstations will be a liability by 2005.

Call us for your Migration and Security needs

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