Over the next two weeks you will likely see a big pile o’ FUD appear because of the imminent end of free support for Windows XP and Office 2003.  First off, that applies only to the residential/consumer level, business support is to remain the same, although if your company runs Server 2003 it had better be upgraded to SP2.  The second thing to remember is that this applies to direct support from Microsoft, such as bug reports and their incident reporting program, Windows Update will still be bringing you critical security patches until 2014.  The Register was nice enough to skip over the fact that this is the latest in a series of so call ‘end of product life’ announcements for XP, but that is a fact.  Perhaps we will see Richmond have a change of mind in the next week, perhaps not.

“After next week, consumer XP and Office 2003 will be put into an “extended support” phase, which means customers will need to pay for Microsoft assistance on a per-incident, per hour, or alternative basis.

Security updates will still be provided for free for Office 2003 and XP Home and Professional until August 4, 2014. After that, the software is retired and users are on their own.

Customers can still get non-security critical fixes if they’ve enrolled in Microsoft’s Extended Hotfix Support program. However, they must purchase the Hotfix agreement within 90 days of mainstream support ending – so it’s rather late for that now.”

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