Report: XP SP2's Impending Demise a Security Concern
Report: XP SP2's Impending Demise a Security Concern
Posted 06/23/2010 at 5:18am
| by Paul Lilly
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If your business is still running Windows XP SP2, you could be in for a world of hurt, warns IT services vendor Softchoice. Come July 13, Microsoft will drop support for SP2 and no longer issue security updates.
According to Softchoice, this is no trivial matter. The IT services vendor surveyed 117 organizations from a variety of industries, including finance, healthcare, manufacturing, and education, and found that 80 percent of them are at risk.
"Many users rightfully delayed their SP2 deployments, but at this point there really isn't a compelling reason to delay the move to SP3," says Dean Williams, Services Development Manager for Softchoice.
According to Williams, SP3 is more of an incremental upgrade rather than a major overhaul. But while the service pack is free, larger businesses not using systems management technology have their work cut out for them in trying to deploy the update.
More here.
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IFLATLINEI
June 23, 2010 at 2:06pm
Yeah upgrading from Windows XP SP2 to SP3 is a major undertaking LOL. Thats funny. Simply put. They should have already been slowly upgrading these machine over the last couple years anyways. Anything that ran on SP2 will run even better on SP3 and be more secure. They are making mountains out of molehills. Most of the update is automatic and just requires a few mouse clicks. Big deal. Of course now if they need to upgrade thousands it may seem like a huge task but again many of these should have already been done by now. Theres no excuses anymore. Just like theres no excuse to still be running Explorer 6. Its quite pathetic actually.
Caboose
June 23, 2010 at 7:54am
At my workplace, I'vebeen updating machines to SP3. Especially since we're rolling out to Office 2010 which requires SP3 before it'll work.
I will be happy when we move over to Windows 7, but that'll be a long time coming.
-= I don't want to be dead, I want to be alive! Or... a cowboy! =-
arosadler
June 23, 2010 at 7:33am
At the insurance office where my wife works, they really don't have the choice to upgrade. The home office won't support Windows 7, and the one machine they have runnig Vista is more clunky than the XP machines. Vista hurt Windows 7's credability. Damn dirty Vista. I'm still amazed at how much better Windows 7 is compared to Vista, but alot of people won't give it a chance.
The Relic
June 23, 2010 at 6:59am
Cost, simple as that. The way companies tend to think, if your current OS is working fine, why upgrade to a new one? And if they think that their older computers won't run 7, then that would be an additional expense. Add the time to do a full install for each of their computers, time loss from computers being down for testing and whatnot, and for businesses that's a major headache.
So they'd just as soon stick with what they have, "for a little longer". I put that in quotations because "a little longer" can stretch out to a lot longer than they intended. My old workplace was still using the last version of Win 95 on their payroll and timeclock computer because their software was incompatible with later versions of Windows. And this was in 2005, when the store closed it's doors.
gendoikari1
June 23, 2010 at 6:56am
"hurr durr, will windowz seven work on mah pentium 2, 256mb ram and a geforce 3? xp worked..."
Also, the fact that people still cling to XP as the best OS ever (who apparently have been living under a rock since October 2009).
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