Microsoft extends Legacy Support

According to this article, Microsoft has extended legacy support and
removed the cap under the Custom Support Agreement for how long it will
support legacy software. This includes XP SP1, NT4 and Exchange 5.5.
Unfortunately 98, 98SE and ME are not covered under this agreement so
there still is no more support for these older operating systems. If
this article has correct and accurate information it baffles me as to
why the support for these older operating systems such as NT4 is needed
since NT4 has the same source code as XP and an operating system such as
98SE is very different since it has an underlying different source code
as well as MS-DOS. (Microsoft Disk Operating System) Any comments would
be appreciated. Thanks in advance for your replies.

http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news...le.php/3628821

NT does not have the "same source code" as XP.

Old NT, which matured at SP4, was installed primarily to business systems.
Many, many such systems are still in place and will be for a perhaps years
to come. Much is invested into those systems and Microsoft derives, I
imagine, significant income, still, from supporting those systems. Same for
Exchange 5.5. Upgrading such systems in a business environment, where many
thousands of mission-critical machines might be involved is in no way
comparable to the home and small business environment where Win9x was sold.

--

Gary S. Terhune
MS-MVP Shell/User


"Dan" wrote in message
...
According to this article, Microsoft has extended legacy support and
removed the cap under the Custom Support Agreement for how long it will
support legacy software. This includes XP SP1, NT4 and Exchange 5.5.
Unfortunately 98, 98SE and ME are not covered under this agreement so
there still is no more support for these older operating systems. If this
article has correct and accurate information it baffles me as to why the
support for these older operating systems such as NT4 is needed since NT4
has the same source code as XP and an operating system such as 98SE is
very different since it has an underlying different source code as well as
MS-DOS. (Microsoft Disk Operating System) Any comments would be
appreciated. Thanks in advance for your replies.

http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news...le.php/3628821

Gary S. Terhune wrote:
NT does not have the "same source code" as XP.

Old NT, which matured at SP4, was installed primarily to business systems.
Many, many such systems are still in place and will be for a perhaps years
to come. Much is invested into those systems and Microsoft derives, I
imagine, significant income, still, from supporting those systems. Same for
Exchange 5.5. Upgrading such systems in a business environment, where many
thousands of mission-critical machines might be involved is in no way
comparable to the home and small business environment where Win9x was sold.


Thanks for the correction, Gary. I see your point. Do you know where I
could read up on this in depth --- technical article preferred.

Read up on what? The difference between NT and XP? Or are you looking for a
deeper understanding of how businesses use and manage their computer
systems?

Either way, I'd probably start at http://msdn.microsoft.com and
http://technet.microsoft.com

MSDN is for developers and I'm sure there are resources galore that discuss
the differences between operating systems, etc., in *very* technical terms.
TechNet is for IT managers and you will find lots of discussion that
involves business-oriented management issues.

--

Gary S. Terhune
MS-MVP Shell/User

"Dan" wrote in message
...
Gary S. Terhune wrote:
NT does not have the "same source code" as XP.

Old NT, which matured at SP4, was installed primarily to business
systems. Many, many such systems are still in place and will be for a
perhaps years to come. Much is invested into those systems and Microsoft
derives, I imagine, significant income, still, from supporting those
systems. Same for Exchange 5.5. Upgrading such systems in a business
environment, where many thousands of mission-critical machines might be
involved is in no way comparable to the home and small business
environment where Win9x was sold.


Thanks for the correction, Gary. I see your point. Do you know where I
could read up on this in depth --- technical article preferred.

Gary S. Terhune wrote:
Read up on what? The difference between NT and XP? Or are you looking for a
deeper understanding of how businesses use and manage their computer
systems?

Either way, I'd probably start at http://msdn.microsoft.com and
http://technet.microsoft.com

MSDN is for developers and I'm sure there are resources galore that discuss
the differences between operating systems, etc., in *very* technical terms.
TechNet is for IT managers and you will find lots of discussion that
involves business-oriented management issues.


I was under the flawed assumption that Microsoft only had two main
source codes which were 9x source code which had its roots in DOS (Dos,
Windows 3.0, 3.1, 95, 98, 98SE and ME) and the NT source code (NT4, 2000
and XP). I naturally thought that it would be easy for businesses to
upgrade since I thought that the transition would be less problematic
than trying to use some legacy DOS programs in XP. I can see your point
about the thousands of dollars that the businesses spent on mission
critical infrastructure and the hesitation to sink in many more dollars
to fix what is not broken. grin

You're more or less right about the "having its roots" description, but
that's a far cry from saying that they're the same.

The migration costs (upgrading systems) are more like in the millions and
billions, not just thousands of dollars. In a business environment, each
machine is just a tiny cell in a multi-celled organism. You have to bring
all the cells all along at the same time and keep all your applications
happy and operational while you're doing it. Not easy at all.

--

Gary


"Dan" wrote in message
...
Gary S. Terhune wrote:
Read up on what? The difference between NT and XP? Or are you looking for
a deeper understanding of how businesses use and manage their computer
systems?

Either way, I'd probably start at http://msdn.microsoft.com and
http://technet.microsoft.com

MSDN is for developers and I'm sure there are resources galore that
discuss the differences between operating systems, etc., in *very*
technical terms. TechNet is for IT managers and you will find lots of
discussion that involves business-oriented management issues.


I was under the flawed assumption that Microsoft only had two main source
codes which were 9x source code which had its roots in DOS (Dos, Windows
3.0, 3.1, 95, 98, 98SE and ME) and the NT source code (NT4, 2000 and XP).
I naturally thought that it would be easy for businesses to upgrade since
I thought that the transition would be less problematic than trying to use
some legacy DOS programs in XP. I can see your point about the thousands
of dollars that the businesses spent on mission critical infrastructure
and the hesitation to sink in many more dollars to fix what is not broken.
grin

Gary S. Terhune wrote:
You're more or less right about the "having its roots" description, but
that's a far cry from saying that they're the same.

The migration costs (upgrading systems) are more like in the millions and
billions, not just thousands of dollars. In a business environment, each
machine is just a tiny cell in a multi-celled organism. You have to bring
all the cells all along at the same time and keep all your applications
happy and operational while you're doing it. Not easy at all.


I see what you are saying about the costs being really high. I guess
the home user will be the one who will not have the support options
because they do not have the amount of dollars and the critical
infrastructure that businesses have. Oh Well, and I for one will
continue to use 98SE as long as I can. I now have an ATI 9800 XT on
this dual boot machine with 256 mb's of video memory and it is still
doing well. It took me a while for the hardware setup because I had to
attach the cable to the power supply and figure out how to make sure
everything would still run but now it works like a charm. I have a 430
watt Atec power supply on this computer which is really nice and plenty
of room for upgrading and changing. I love working with computers even
if they are sometimes frustrating because I realize that it is almost
always me that is doing something wrong and then I need to figure out
how to correct it and this newsgroup has helped me immensely with that.
The video card has its own fan. I think it took me about 3-5 hours
total to get it installed and the software all configured correctly and
to make sure the registry was tweaked nicely and so fourth. This is a
long time but it was the first time I installed a video card that needed
to be hooked into the power supply. It is just so nice to be able to
dig down in the guts of the software and figure things out. I also
notice that Microsoft is releasing the Internet Explorer Optical Mouse
3.0 but it will not be for 98SE for some reason. I use this mouse along
with an older mouse with a DOS driver for my older games. BTW, have you
seen Chris Quirke's new blog on safety which has some good points I
think. Thanks again for the comments and I really appreciate them.

Just MHO...

MS saw the 9x code as a dead end. They wanted all their OSes to have
the same code base, so with ME they killed off the 9x line and concentrated
on their NT legacy. This insured that their clients would only have one
code base OS and support would concentrate on this. The small hitch is
that Win 98SE proved to be much more useful and in fact is the only MS
OS that runs on old hardware (i.e. 200MHz CPU, 64MB RAM, 2GB hard
drives) and is (barely) compatible with .NET, so lots of people still use it,
much to MSs' chagrin.

Even so, MS wants to concentrate on their NT line and already has its
hands full with W2K and XP (with Vista on the horizon).

Regards,
Saga

"Dan" wrote in message ...
According to this article, Microsoft has extended legacy support and removed the cap under the
Custom Support Agreement for how long it will support legacy software. This includes XP SP1, NT4
and Exchange 5.5. Unfortunately 98, 98SE and ME are not covered under this agreement so there
still is no more support for these older operating systems. If this article has correct and
accurate information it baffles me as to why the support for these older operating systems such as
NT4 is needed since NT4 has the same source code as XP and an operating system such as 98SE is
very different since it has an underlying different source code as well as MS-DOS. (Microsoft Disk
Operating System) Any comments would be appreciated. Thanks in advance for your replies.

http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news...le.php/3628821

Saga wrote:
Just MHO...

MS saw the 9x code as a dead end. They wanted all their OSes to have
the same code base, so with ME they killed off the 9x line and concentrated
on their NT legacy. This insured that their clients would only have one
code base OS and support would concentrate on this. The small hitch is
that Win 98SE proved to be much more useful and in fact is the only MS
OS that runs on old hardware (i.e. 200MHz CPU, 64MB RAM, 2GB hard
drives) and is (barely) compatible with .NET, so lots of people still use it,
much to MSs' chagrin.

Even so, MS wants to concentrate on their NT line and already has its
hands full with W2K and XP (with Vista on the horizon).

Regards,
Saga

"Dan" wrote in message ...
According to this article, Microsoft has extended legacy support and removed the cap under the
Custom Support Agreement for how long it will support legacy software. This includes XP SP1, NT4
and Exchange 5.5. Unfortunately 98, 98SE and ME are not covered under this agreement so there
still is no more support for these older operating systems. If this article has correct and
accurate information it baffles me as to why the support for these older operating systems such as
NT4 is needed since NT4 has the same source code as XP and an operating system such as 98SE is
very different since it has an underlying different source code as well as MS-DOS. (Microsoft Disk
Operating System) Any comments would be appreciated. Thanks in advance for your replies.

http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news...le.php/3628821



Thanks for your comments, Saga. I feel that 98SE is still useful too
and hopefully Microsoft will eventually realize this and if they do not
want to use this old code anymore then sell it or even license it to
others that would use it.

This announcement has no benefit whatsoever to anyone outside a corporate
environment, even if it did cover Win9x. Corporate customers can purchase
support that extends beyond the normal limits. This program costs money
(LOTS OF MONEY!) and is not available to home users. It also does not cover
any problem caused by anything other than the base operating system -
security updates are not part of the CSA project, nor are problems caused by
interaction between the OS and non-Microsoft products.

So yes, if you insist on running Exchange 5.5 on Windows NT 4.0 Server you
can purchase support - but if anything outside of Exchange/NT causes a
problem you're out of luck.

And as others have pointed out, NT4 does not have the same source code as
XP; and Windows 95, 98, and Me are not based on MS-DOS.

--
Richard G. Harper [MVP Shell/User]
* PLEASE post all messages and replies in the newsgroups
* for the benefit of all. Private mail is usually not replied to.
* My website, such as it is ... http://rgharper.mvps.org/
* HELP us help YOU ... http://www.dts-l.org/goodpost.htm


"Dan" wrote in message
...
According to this article, Microsoft has extended legacy support and
removed the cap under the Custom Support Agreement for how long it will
support legacy software. This includes XP SP1, NT4 and Exchange 5.5.