Submitted by With the recent release of Microsoft’s newest potential cash cows, Windows Vista and Office 2007, the company is expecting a wave of upgrades from users seeking the latest functionality. But what if you’re not looking for new bells and whistles? What if you want to keep your old operating systems, such as Windows 2000, running as long as possible? Microsoft isn’t making it easy for you.
Why would you install music player software and an Office suite on a Server OS?
Granted, 2000 is a good OS and it’s great if software works on it, but no one has any right to complain when it doesn’t.
Win2k is used fairly heavily on corporate desktops, not servers.
Not from what I’ve seen. It’s heavily used on both desktops AND servers in many places. Considering that the next server upgrade after Windows 2000 Server was Server 2003, and many didn’t upgrade to that due to costs.
Sure, some places have migrated their desktops from Windows 2000 to Windows XP, and some will upgrade to Vista.
My main issue is that Microsoft is deliberately not supporting products in order to encourage users to upgrade a perfectly working product to a new, fancier, expensive product that requires much more powerful hardware. Vista offers no real advantage to those in a corporate environment imho. It’s extremely expensive (AU $751 for Vista Ultimate), it’s still not the full McCoy with security either. Even the base version is still very pricey, much pricier than Windows XP. It simply is not good value. I can go out and buy OS X Tiger for AU $199. Would I pay $199 or $751? I’ll let you guess!
Furthermore, as more evidence of deliberate sales tactics from Microsoft, SP3 for Windows XP is long overdue, but is even now being pushed back to late 2007, or even 2008. This is completely unnacceptable.
Linux still lacks polish – you can argue with me on that, but to the average computer user, they would simply get frustrated with Linux in all honesty. OS X does have polish, and features and is reasonably priced. Of course, you have to pay the Apple Hardware Tax (AHT). If you can live with that, it’s much better value, and a much better performer,and more secure to boot.
If you’re looking for corporate software, my honest advice is to consider Solaris 10 for at least the servers, if not the workstations. Migrate your proprietary Word documents etc to an open format, such as ODF whilst you still can. At least Sun looks after its customers better.
Dave
Linux still lacks polish – you can argue with me on that, but to the average computer user, they would simply get frustrated with Linux in all honesty. OS X does have polish, and features and is reasonably priced. Of course, you have to pay the Apple Hardware Tax (AHT). If you can live with that, it’s much better value, and a much better performer,and more secure to boot.
If you’re looking for corporate software, my honest advice is to consider Solaris 10 for at least the servers, if not the workstations. Migrate your proprietary Word documents etc to an open format, such as ODF whilst you still can. At least Sun looks after its customers better.
How could you possibly advise people to use Solaris over Linux for workstations? Your only options for a desktop is either the ancient CDE or the ugliest, most un-polished version of GNOME in existence.
Good point, so I’ll clarify my original statement (and of course, intent).
In a work environment, people typically do a very limited number of functions. They don’t need to know, or even use every single feature and sub feature of the operating system. They simply need whatever tools they need in order to the job, and they need to know how to use those particular tools. Whether you believe it or not, the average person in the office is a trained monkey. Do this, press this, and this happens. They don’t usually understand why it happens, or how, they just do what they’re told, in order to do their job. Nothing more, and nothing less. I mean that in no disrepect to these aforementioned people. Those type of people don’t pull an operating system or desktop environment apart to see how it works, or why, they just do their task and that’s it. Even an ‘ugly’ desktop environment like CDE can allow a user to do this, and do it well.
I suggested Solaris, because in all honesty, it’s cheaper to get support from Sun Microsystems for Solaris 10 than it is for Red Hat or Suse enterprise editions. Whether you like it or not, Sun’s Solaris is more advanced in many areas than Linux at the current point of time. True, for most people, in most applications, they will never use these advanced items.
If your employer can do without having ‘paid support’, and is prepared to train staff to administer the systems, then Linus is a much better bet. A good Linux admin, running Debian will do wonders. Support agreements invariably come from closed source systems, where you cannot research (or easily research) yourself. The very nature of the closed source system forces you to pay money to the operating system vendor to reveal their secrets in order to fix your issue(s). Linux support has come about because your modern IT manager foolishly believes that they must pay lots of money in expensive support contracts to fix basic issues that should be well documented by the vendor. True, not every sysadmin wants to research and fix problems themselves, and nor do they always have the time to do so.
Dave
I guess the complain is about installing such software on Windows 2000 Professional…
“Why would you install music player software and an Office suite on a Server OS?”
Yes, but they run. An Operating System is there to run software. Nobody should be dictacting how you should use your operating system. It’s telling, quite how people come to accept that companies dictate to you what software you are allowed to run entirely based on what a few bytes says. What’s next – having to buy a $400 upgrade because an installer says so?
I’m not entirely sure I agree.
If you try and install, say, a Fedora RPM on Mandriva, you’ll likely get a bunch of conflict / dependency errors.
However, if you force the installation, quite a lot of the time…the app will actually run, at least to some degree.
Does this mean we (Linux distributors) should relax our dependencies etc so everyone’s packages install without complaint on everyone else’s distro, packages from one version of the distro install happily on other versions, etc?
Well, no. The fact that the software sometimes happens to run comes under the heading of ‘happy accident’. It’s not intended, we didn’t build it that way, we didn’t test it that way, we don’t support it that way.
I expect Defender / Zune on 2K comes under the same heading for Microsoft. They built them on Vista / XP with the expectation that that’s what they would be run on. I expect they tested them on those OSes as well, not on 2K.
So, by a happy accident, they run – to some extent – on 2K, according to these reports.
Does that mean all is well and good and Microsoft should be blasted for not ‘allowing’ installation on 2K? Not necessarily. What if it turns out with some more extensive testing that these apps don’t actually work correctly? That they conflict with something else? That they have some bugs that weren’t exposed by elementary “does it run?” testing? That Defender turns out not to actually defend on 2K?
If Microsoft didn’t build / test these apps for those OSes, then that’s an entirely possible outcome, and in that case it would be irresponsible to *allow* installation on 2K.
Let’s not jump to bashing right away.
No, but I recall WinNT4 desktop and WinNT Server being two bytes away. I also recall Windows XP Home & Pro being two bytes away. Microsoft have been known to purposefully cripple software to enforce upgrades.
Well, of course they are. When you’re releasing a range of products like that, that’s by far the most sensible way to do it, rather than producing builds that actually have the code in question removed – that’s far more error prone.
CPU manufacturers do the exact same thing – they don’t carefully manufacture one set of CPUs that will run at exactly 2.4GHz, one set that will run at exactly 2.6GHz, one set that will run at exactly 2.8GHz etc. No, they make a bunch of identical CPUs, throw them through testing, and mark them as appropriate for the market – if they made a million CPUs and wanted to sell 333,333 at each speed, but all one million happened to work at 2.8GHz, they wouldn’t ship them all out as 2.8GHz parts, they’d label 333,333 of them as 2.4GHz parts and 333,333 of them as 2.6GHz parts and ship them like that. This is why overclocking works. It’s not really evil.
Graphics card manufacturers do the same thing too – cards which are slower than other cards in the same line (and thus cheaper) because they’re clocked slower or have fewer pipelines are usually actually identical in hardware. This isn’t evil either.
It would only be ‘evil’ if the manufacturer *lied* to you – if they told you you were getting XP Pro, or a 2.8GHz CPU, or an eight pipeline graphics card, then sent you a copy of Home, or a 2.4GHz CPU, or a four pipeline graphics card. But they don’t. They tell you what you’re getting and you choose whether to pay for it or not. It may be a bit _galling_ to know the extra functionality is actually all there but just hidden from you, but hey, that’s the consequence of the economic system we use: if you don’t like it, advocate change.
It’s honestly a shame. Before 2K3, Windows 2000 is Microsoft’s best operating system. It’s lean, fast, runs on just about any hardware (Works fine on P166), and has all the power under the hood of XP (sans better DX support).
If Microsoft wanted to make an OS that businesses would buy in the millions, then they should have kept everything that made 2000 good, and just expanded on it (reliability, low hardware). Instead they try and force the media hungry Vista into a market that has no interest in it. I suppose it’s only a sign of a company telling others what they want, instead of listening to their customers.
and has all the power under the hood of XP (sans better DX support).
What do you mean by better DX support? Win2K support the same (latest) DirectX 9 version as XP does. No difference here.
Edited 2006-12-18 19:25
Windows 2000 was not good with games at the time (compared to Windows 98), everything was geared up for 9x. Windows XP, included a number of changes to better support the games of the time (including the backwards compatibility properties tab). This of course isn’t such an issue now, but it was then. NT-Kernal used to be a quite strictly business-only breed.
Well, that’s closer to truth. But backwards compatiblity is indeed not an issue for long time. I succesfully run some modern games under W2K with no performance difference over XP or Win2K3.
I’m not referring to modern games. I’m referring to games that were released before Windows XP. Windows 2K was not very compatible with Windows 98 gaming at the time. I even had to dual boot Win98 and 2K back then.
It wasnt the DirectX problem but rather the particular game(s) incompatibility with NT-based platform.
SlayerUI is available on both XP and 2K with minimal differece. So backwardscompatibillity is almost exactly the same in 2K as in Xp just not enabled by default. Also DirectX games of the DX8,8.1 and 9(AB) run faster on 2K. Just look at what OS that has the highest scores compared to hardware in futuremarks suites before the SLI cards came into picture. Also Most apps that “cant be installed” on “k actually run perfectly. A good example of this is Age of empires 3. Says in the installer that it requires windows xp but if you install it on another computer with XP and just copy it over to the 2K machine, deleting the first install (copyright reasons) It will run just fine. This is the case for almost all apps the “require” XP.
Most people play some 2D video/porn. win2k by default use the old video renderer. winxp or later use video mixing renderer. Old video renderer has quite a lot of limitation, e.g. only 1 concurrent hardware accelerated output. Although software can choose to use VMR explicitly, most DShow video players just let windows to decide. So winxp’s directx support is indeed superior in a (artificial) sense.
It’s lean, fast, runs on just about any hardware (Works fine on P166)
This advantage makes it best Windows to run under qemu or other emulation/virtualization software like xen, win4bsd or vmware.
Edited 2006-12-18 19:50
This advantage makes it best Windows to run under qemu or other emulation/virtualization software like xen, win4bsd or vmware.
Sorry but, last time I checked, you needed to recompile the OS you wanted to run under Xen, and AFAIK you can’t recompile any Windows OS.
And people, in a few days Win2K will be more than seven years old, that’s a pretty long support window don’t you think? I know, this sucks (here at work we’ll have to move a few hundreds of workstations to XP) but it was going to happen, sooner or later.
Sorry but, last time I checked, you needed to recompile the OS you wanted to run under Xen, and AFAIK you can’t recompile any Windows OS.
Not if you have the new virtualization hardware (VT and Pacifica).
You can use Windows2000 on xen but on processors that support virtualization Intel VT or AMD [AMD-V] just like that.
And You can use Windows2000 exclusively on qemu/vmware/win4bsd/win4lin on all other processors, including these that support virtualization.
And people, in a few days Win2K will be more than seven years old, that’s a pretty long support window don’t you think?
Yes but it “does the job” if it comes to emulation/virtualization, You can also use Windows2003 it also has similar requirements.
//And people, in a few days Win2K will be more than seven years old, that’s a pretty long support window don’t you think?//
I have customers who want solutions that are supportable for 30 years.
The fact that Windows OSes run out of support after a mere 7 years and also that Windows OSes do not come with the source code means that I cannot use Windows as part of the solution for my customers.
If I cannot use Windows OSes, I also cannot use any other Microsoft software, nor can I use any proprietary formats that are supported only on Windows platforms.
You’re right about vmware. And Windows 2000 is the only Windows version I currently use.
If its not broken why fix it. Really all the MS OSs have held to the timeline that it becomes moderately stable right around the time of the next OS release. NT 4 became tolerable right around 2000 came out, 2000 was decent from the get go but only truly became stable for me when XP came. I recently found myself using my wifes PC and after doing a crap load of updates I found XP to be pretty decent, guess what coming soon. Vista. So it should take them 3-5 years to get that right with help all their Beta testers (cough cough regular windows users cough cough). Will I use vista, well because the way of world is now, yes I will be forced at some point. Be it at work or play. Of course I am seriously tempted the next time we have to buy my wife a pc to buy a Mac Mini (or the then equivalent). Of course that is a ways off.
This is a huge issue for anyone planning to run on Microsoft servers for a long time. Instead of having a long support for a product, Microsoft will intentionally drop support for a still viable OS (remember that it was still their flagship server product just 3 years ago).
True, Red Hat and others will also drop support for systems after few years, but open source basis allows third party companies (or anyone) to mantain it, while with Windows people are left screwed, with option to buy again what they already have (a server OS), exactly what MS wants.
Maybe this is why my workplace upgraded all our 2000 machines to XP last month. I thought it seemed a bit strange at the time.
… Microsoft really is promoting the use of Suse Linux Enterprise!
Edited 2006-12-18 20:27
I’m one of those who got XP with my last computer purchase and still prefers to run my trusty w2k professional. now, I can’t really complain about microsoft not going out of their way to support an ‘old’ operating system, but the question is if they are deliberately locking w2k out of the loop in order to ‘force’ upgrading.
like I said, I got XP pre-installed on my latest machine. so I used a program called ‘doubledriver’ to extract all the updated drivers. then I installed w2k together with those updated ‘XP’ drivers and they have worked flawlessly.
so my guess is that the only thing that prevents certain software from working on w2k is in fact a system version check at the start of the program.
After all these years, anyone who doesn’t factor in the cost of Microsofts mandatory upgrades into their total costs of ownership is just being stupid. There are often alternatives that don’t lock you in. The might be a little more expensive up front to get everything working right, but in the long run they’ll invariably be cheaper. Allowing yourself to be locked in to a vendor like Microsoft without very carefully looking at alternatives just shows a tremendous lack of good judgement, nothing more.
So to sum up :
1) Can’t buy a Zune
2) Can’t use Windows Defender
I’m sure the Windows 2000 users will happily buy an iPod and use an alternative anti-spyware solution (?)
At least you can add “doesn’t work on Windows 2000” to the ever growing list of reasons why the Zune sucks.
They’re making a rod for their own back there, surely?
The article states that all MS products get 5 years max support, other than KB articles. After that, you’d better be upgrading. I’ll be upgrading, all right — right to GNU/Linux!
Good article overall, but there was one rather silly comment from the admin they spoke with:
A utility known as tzedit.exe, which is included in the Microsoft Windows Resource Kit, allows manual editing of Registry keys that define the beginning and ending of DST.
Chinnery says he’s accepted the fact that he’ll have to use the utility to fix his Windows 2000 systems. But, lacking an easily deployable patch, it means he must walk around to tweak each machine in his organization. This is a chore he doesn’t feel he should face.
If it’s a registry key, can’t it simply be changed to tne necessary value on one machine, then exported to a .reg file and deployed that way? I’ve done that in several smaller networks, to quickly enable concurent RDP connections and show the Admin account on the Welcome screen.
I really have no problem with being modded down if it’s valid – but unless the post is unequivocally in violation of the OSAlert posting guidelines, I think it’s decidedly un-classy and immature to mod-down a post without making any reply whatsoever. Not that I expect better around here, but still, that’s my $0.02.
Half of the businesses I used to deal with run XP / 2k quite happily, and I think they would choke in realising that most of their PCs would require pretty drastic upgrades to run Vista!
It almost seems that every time a new windows release is out, the very least you have to do is throw another gig of RAM at your desktops for it to play nice…Win 2k almost seems like a mistake as it was one of the least bloated MS products ever.
Edited 2006-12-18 23:18
Upgrading from 2000 to XP… this late? (now that XP is starting to be phased out) Doesn’t make sense to me, but it’s not my money…
True though about Xen; if I’m not mistaken, it currently only supports Linux.
it currently only supports Linux
NetBSD has great xen support, also porting xen to FreeBSD is at very advanced state.
Because MS evil policy on win2k, it is my last MS OS. Linux will be my favor.
I’ve seen all sorts of equipment run on it. It supports SMP. It doesn’t need heavy horsepower to run. It has adequate security for the workplace given the amount of holes they’ve plugged for it in the past 6+ years. Simply put, there’s not a whole lot that Win2k isn’t able to handle in the corporate environment.
An XP upgrade is pointless for companies, and Vista Any-Flavor can just as well sit on the shelves for what it’s worth. Hell, my company is still massively using Win2k and Office 97 and 99.99% of the users don’t even know the difference. It runs Solidworks like a champ, with a good video card of course. The only time anyone gets XP is if it came pre-installed on a new PC that was purchased in the past year.
That’s merely my opinion, but the cost-benefit analysis of upgrading desktops simply to run office apps, just because, makes zero sense.
Just to let you know about your Solidworks comment,
At my workplace, we are still almost exclusively Win2K, with just a few XP machines (bought the last year or two). We run Solidworks 2006 SP5, works great.
We have SW2007 ready to install, BUT, it won’t run on 2K anymore. SW2007 requires XP or better.
So we will be upgrading all the engineering systems to XP in the near future. I really don’t think we’ll go to Vista any time soon.
I run 2K Pro at home as well and have no interest in upgrading. The only way I’ll use something newer is if it comes loaded on my next machine, but I usually build ny own.
Interesting news about Solidworks. Our company upgraded to SW2006 (or 2005?) last year and for some reason needed to upgrade to Office 2003. Don’t know why Solidworks is forcing platform upgrades. That’s a pretty hefty cost to swallow. First you have to pay for the Solidworks license (not cheap) and then have to pay to upgrade the OS and Office package. You’re looking at a good $2k per user, at least. Not to mention any potential video card upgrades.
When the IT department is as spend-thrift as ours is it must kill them to spend this much cash at one time.
I was looking at the Opera 9.1 downloads for linux. Now there like 54 or so different downloads including 5 for the supposedly user friendly ubuntu. One was for ubuntu 6.06 and the other for 6.10 -2 in the same version number. That’s ridiculous!
I didn’t see any for kubuntu which is the linux that i downloaded.
Most developers aren’t going to be so gracious to provide 54 different versions of the same thing for one OS.
I was looking at the Opera 9.1 downloads for linux. Now there like 54 or so different downloads including 5 for the supposedly user friendly ubuntu. One was for ubuntu 6.06 and the other for 6.10 -2 in the same version number. That’s ridiculous!
I didn’t see any for kubuntu which is the linux that i downloaded.
Most developers aren’t going to be so gracious to provide 54 different versions of the same thing for one OS.
It’s the job of the Linux distributor to “port” apps to their linux distro. It’s easiest with FOSS applications, of course, but even PrOprietary Software can be ported to supposedly “unsupported” distributions – I’ve seen FreeBSD and Gentoo do it for VMWare, for example.
Of course if the proprietary software vendor uses a proprietary software installer, you and your distro might be SOL. Chalk another one up for the disadvantages of POS.
Or maybe Linux users need to get their heads out of the sand and standardize a little to make it easier for closed source software. It’s not going away and you’re just depriving yourself of some really good software. You’re also discouraging companies from porting so called killer apps to Linux. Apps like Photoshop. Apps that drive adoption.
Or maybe Linux users need to get their heads out of the sand and standardize a little to make it easier for closed source software. It’s not going away and you’re just depriving yourself of some really good software. You’re also discouraging companies from porting so called killer apps to Linux. Apps like Photoshop. Apps that drive adoption.
Actually, companies that get a clue already *do* port their proprietary apps to Linux, and, for reasons that you could have read if you had wanted to, I have already stated that it is easy for proprietary apps to be ported to whatever distribution.
If Acrobat can provide Acrobat Reader for Linux then it can provide Photoshop. There is no reason why the distribution format should make a jot of difference.
I was looking at the Opera 9.1 downloads for linux. Now there like 54 or so different downloads including 5 for the supposedly user friendly ubuntu. One was for ubuntu 6.06 and the other for 6.10 -2 in the same version number. That’s ridiculous!
I didn’t see any for kubuntu which is the linux that i downloaded.
That’s not Linux screwing you. Opera is screwing you by not making the application open source. If the code was open you could compile it yourself. Open source is the only way to avoid these kinds of problems.
As for your problem the ubuntu build will probably work considering kubuntu is just ubuntu with a kde interface as far as I know.
One was for ubuntu 6.06 and the other for 6.10 -2 in the same version number. That’s ridiculous!
Oh no! Next thing you know Windows software makers will provide different versions for 9x and 2k/XP! Oh wait…
It’s free (as in beer) software buddy. If you don’t like it, complain to all the people that give their time for free.
Otherwise, use an opensource alternative like Firefox.
Failing that, use Windows.
Edited 2006-12-19 09:29
You go right on alienating customers. Then maybe they’ll finally push ISV’s to help them migrate away from your crap {operating systems,security policies,marketing strategies,customer service}.
Shame you’re too “ideological” not to see your applications go down with the sinking ship.
Hasta la Windows Vista, baby!
Tim Holwerdi
Hi, My name is Tim Holwerdi.
I am gonna tell you my last dream…
I am an Aszzhole in search of Notoriety…
I work in a Website that offers news of IT and Open Source.
I pretend that I do it for the sake of love for IT, but the fact is that, I am expecting good revenues for the
future…
If not, why should I loose my time looking for IT news in other IT Web Sites that offer what I am not able to
offer… for the sake of these IT weirdos geeks and Open source-free computing fanboys…? c’mon…
I think I know more than the rest, of course… and I am always right!
Yes, I know more than anyone of you about Computers, and about anything else you can imagine! even If many people prove me the contrary, I am still right…
Me and my Mac go together everywhere, I even sleep with it, which is somehow problematic, cause as you can imagine, is not easy to have sexual relations tru an USB port, or a FireWire one… but I am in love anyway!…
Anything that is not Mac or commercial, is just wacko rubbish!
And, of course, is not going to offer me anything, because all these Open Source weirdos have no future, and are not gonna advertise in my site, or pay me money… I dont even talk about the FSF retarded hippies!
At best the big companies that now move to Linux, and pretend to be Open Source, worth a little bit, and may be a source of revenues in the future if the have some sucess…
Cheers…
P.S. Apple Rocks… Linux sucks… (MS is very good also, cause they have plenty of money, and are the pattern of our great western Businnes Economic and social system…)
They actually ended mainstream support before the cut off date, otherwise there would have been a WMP10 for Win2k. I don’t care about WMP but it’s still wrong.
Like other Win2k users here I also hate artificial limitations on software. Win2k and XP are so similar that I doubt in 99% of cases that there’s any technical reason why software that works on XP won’t work on 2k. It’s expected of MS (though still wrong) but I really hate it when games do it. I seriously doubt that there’s any reason that any of those WinXP only games wouldn’t work on 2k. I know one game only requires a dll that you can get from OpenOffice of all places.
Oh well, Win2k will most likely be my last MS OS. I don’t believe in asking permission to use something I bought so unless MS drops WPA that’ll be that. Plus, my (legal) source for cheap MS stuff is gone and I doubt I could afford to pay full price anyway.
Edited 2006-12-19 23:10
I have the same problem with trying to toy with xna, only the game studio install is limited to xp.
wich is not really a requirement as I think that xna is based on dotnet, and dotnet is supposed to give us cross platform compaltibility. But microsoft a decided to give more credibility as a cross platform virtual machine to … java.
I agree that aging os shouldn’t be used but windows 2000 is still a modern OS ( heck even nt4 is still a decent desktop os, but lack of multimedia ability ).