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#1
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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 |
#2
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Microsoft extends Legacy Support
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 |
#3
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Microsoft extends Legacy Support
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. |
#4
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Microsoft extends Legacy Support
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. |
#5
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Microsoft extends Legacy Support
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 |
#6
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Microsoft extends Legacy Support
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 |
#7
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Microsoft extends Legacy Support
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. |
#8
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Microsoft extends Legacy Support
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 |
#9
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Microsoft extends Legacy Support
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. |
#10
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Microsoft extends Legacy Support
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. |
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