Kurt Shintaku's Blog

We rereleased the Windows 2000 SP4 Rollup aka the replacement for SP5.

 

NOT A SERVICE PACK

To be clear, this is NOT the same thing as a Service Pack.  Service Packs are massively regression tested against hundreds of the most commonly used products and services in 1000s of scenarios.  Windows 2000 is however no longer covered by Standard product support, which means that no Service Packs are produced for it. 

 

PATCH BUNDLING ONLY!

This means the only thing you can get are patches.  A "Rollup" is simply the bundling of these patches into a single install for the purposes of ease-of-installation on new servers.  (The patches bundled are recommended, critical, and all security related patches)  We are basically not doing anything but limited testing against patches to see that the patch rectifies the bug.  What the impact is of that fix against applications or the impact of the fix against other patches is not tested – this is why Service Packs are so important.

 

WHITHER WIN2000?

Windows 2000 is in a state called "Extended Support".  Only security related fixes will be created;  non-security related fixes will NOT be implemented or patched unless you have purchased a specific support agreement with Microsoft such as a Extended Hotfix agreement for Win2000 or a Premier Support agreement. (a large scale purchaseable contract with Microsoft that provides direct support for virtually all our products)  Warranty support, design changes, or new features will not be considered regardless of the support level a customer has.

 

Translation:   Start getting off of Windows 2000 now.  It’s over 5 years old and in a year we’re going to release another version of the operating system.  And if you have software that doesn’t run on Windows XP or Windows Server 2003, I suggest you have a strongly worded chat with the ISV that produced it and consider moving to other solutions because, to be frank, we’re simply not going to spend millions of dollars supporting an old product just because some ISV is too lazy or cheap to test and support their product on the newer operating systems. 

 

Windows 95 and NT4.0 are examples of 10 year old products that DON’T EVEN GET SECURITY PATCHED ANY MORE.  If you’re still on those, you’re sitting on a timebomb.  There are known viruses that attack those systems with no available patch or fix other than to move to a more current OS.

 

An explanation of these levels of support are available at this web site: