RIP Windows 2000…

♫ For whom the bell tolls
Time marches on
For whom the bell tolls…♫

Lyrics and Music by: Clifford Lee Burton; James Alan Hetfield; Lars Ulrich, recorded by: Metallica.

Microsoft has officially cut the life support on a number of products this week. Prominent among these products are:

Now to be fair, these products won’t stop working, however, Microsoft has stopped issuing any further support or patches or security upgrades.

Microsoft has stated:

Unsupported products or service packs pose a significant risk to your computer’s security. Therefore, Microsoft advises customers to migrate to the latest supported service pack and/or product prior to the end of support. Our latest products, such as Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, provide greater security, reliability, environment-friendly features, and a host of other benefits.

If you are running XP SP2, you will need to install SP3 (Service Pack 3).

IT professionals upgrading a network can go here for the upgrade and information.

If you are only updating one computer, go here.

By the way, you will have to perform this upgrade using Internet Explorer version 5 or greater. If you would like to upgrade to the latest version of IE (version 8) click here.

Of course this all begs the question: if you are still running Windows 2000, isn’t it time to upgrade the hardware as well? The latest version of Windows 2000 was last released:

5.0 SP4 Rollup 1 v2 (5.0.3700.6690) (13 September 2005; 4 years ago (2005-09-13))

This means that your hardware is at least 4 years old and perhaps much older than that.

All this may sound quaint to most of us dealing with Windows 7, but I had a call from a firm just last week who were limping through with computers that were ‘about 10 years old’, which would place them squarely in the Windows 2000 era. Time has marched on….for those computers I think the bell has tolled…