For those still using Windows NT 4.0, the time is near for Microsoft to bury the hatchet. Late June marks the end for telephone support for the 7 year old operating system. Microsoft has kept NT on tap by releasing several patches and fixes, but after Microsoft drops support for NT, customer’s only option is to help themselves using the online KnowledgeBase.
!
I can only hope this is what businesses need to update their systems.
The thought of all those domains and setting up trust relationships between give me the shivers!
Not orphaned, just have to move to the next relase. Same goes for OSS.
At my company, they refused to upgrade to a newer version of Windows because of “cost”. However, they never took into account the cost of all the countless “bluescreens” forcing people to redo their work, the countless server crashes causing major downtimes (and cost), the extra manpower necessary to support these unstable systems, the amount of time to install new systems or update current systems, the major technical limitations of the OS, the security concerns of the system, the plain shortcomings of the user interface, etc. During the last year, after Microsoft made it 100 % clear they are dropping support, we have been busy upgrading our domain to Windows 2000. This has greatly increased end-user/support satisfaction, stability, uptime, all the while decreasing the overall cost. People might say that it is underhanded of Microsoft to force customers to upgrade, and when the time comes when I’m forced to upgrade Windows 2000, I might agree. However, right now, as one of the many persons who have been forced to take a time out from real devlopment work to support these NT boxes, I say good riddance, and goodbye to such a SH!++Y OS.
7 years of support? wow. What about the server edition? i heard it was 8 years O_O
Apparently the good folks at Flexbeta.net don’t really know what the phrase “Bury the hatchet” means…
“but after Microsoft drops support for NT, customer’s only option is to help themselves using the online KnowledgeBase.”
From which Microsoft will no doubt erase any and all references to NT leaving the customers with almost no choices for support from the company that made billions off of those same customers.
customer’s only option is to help themselves using the online KnowledgeBase.
WTF!?
MICROSOFT has deleted nearly all the help for nt4!
If you have been supporting windows and have a memory not of a gold fish, then you would remember that before win2k was released there were thousands of articles on their online KnowledgeBase. I could search for most things and not get an answer, but get something that looked close.
Now, when i search for winnt4 issues I dont get as many hits. How long will it be before I cant find anything? Does anyone have a mirror of the online KnowledgeBase from before win2k was released? Because that is the only way to fix some problems, or upgrade to win2k3 ( – no hidden motive for removing all online KnowledgeBase help for winnt4! honest!)
And has anyone else noticed that a portion of win2000 articles have been removed and replaced with identical articles for win2k3?
Or the fact that google no longer searches the m$ online KnowledgeBase anymore. You can only use the m$ online KnowledgeBase search engine to serch the online KnowledgeBase. Google searches anything else tho
How can a company be as 2 faced as m$, that they can online Knowledge and at the same time tell everyone to go to their online KnowledgeBase for some self-help, and still be respected and called a leader by the IT community?
Didn’t you guys know you’re supposed to hang on to those old MSDN CDs? Articles disappear to encourage turnover of product licenses. I’ll bet it becomes increasingly hard to find out anything about Visual Basic 6.0 for example.
I agree Windows 2000 is a much better OS though.
Porting our last app off of NT to Unix this month… whew
1st of all
Salaries, whether you are wasting your time doing a reboot or being super production looks the same on the balancesheet. You cost the company 50K or whatever. No matter if you managed to create the perfect product, save the company money, or whatever. Its still just 50K
Upgrades, or capital expenditures, show up. Last year I didn’t upgrade, therefore nothing showed up in the balance sheet, and therefore, my shareholders are happy.
However, now if I upgrade, then guess what? A new entry and a new expenditure. Not so nice! Cost me money! And then the $$$ drives down my valuation. Too bad
And before anyone starts going “Use Linux, its free”, it never is for a company. You need support, you need people to get it to work, you need to do backups, etc etc. Licensing costs are usually trivial compared to that 50K.
to throw away all the headaches and pains of experience…
Hehehehe…these guys crack me up. Which makes me wonder when support for XP will come to anend.
/me hugs linux
nt 4.0, the less bastard OS from microsoft. . . bye bye
I really don’t understand why anyone would change operating systems just because Microsoft is dropping telephone technical support. I’ve been administrating about 100 Windows 95 desktops since 1995. I have personally installed (or imaged) Windows on all the machines, reformatting the OEM preinstalled drives as soon as they came out of the box. My users get two, maybe three BSODs a year. Once, back in 95, I called Microsoft Technical Support. They were no help, I figured out the problem and fixed it myself. Don’t get me wrong, I DO NOT advocate or condone the use of the Windows program but my users get only two or three BSODs a year. I’ll admit that W2K and 98SE are slightly better that NT and 95 but after extensive experience with XP these 95 machine are going to either continue running 95 or get upgraded to Linux some day.
it’s not as if you get support from MS anyway.
You have to pay for TechNet support and even then you get a person on the end of the line, who is using the knowledge base web site.
It’s only when you do the pay per incident that it goes to someone else.
bury the hatchet? i think you are misunderstanding what this idiom means. it comes from an old native american tradition of burying a hatchet (weapon shaped like a small axe) in the ground as part of a peace pact between warring nations.
it has come to mean to end any long-standing argument, grudge or disagreement.
so it doesn’t really fit with microsoft and nt.
probably a better choice would have been “microsoft will soon put the last nail in nt’s coffin”.
http://www.fargo.k12.nd.us/schools/Washington/Schutz/bury_the_hatch…
Another one would be “Microsoft gives customers the wooden spoon”.
Btw, who in the right mind is running Windows NT4? sure, if you said it 3 years ago, I could understand, but today? who ever is making the decision in the respective organisation should be given a public flogging, and yes, I would administer the punishment with pleasure.
that a seven year old OS even has to have support calls logged against it. You would think that they could get it in tip-top shape after a few years. What is worse is they took the Win98 desktop, plug-n-play and the NT permissions scheme, boxed it up and called in Windows 2000. I have had more core dumps and sudden reboots on my Win2k Pro box than I ever did blue screens on any NT4 system I ran.
Oh well, does anyone else see coincidence between the obsolesence of NT, the SCO suit and Windows XP’s lackluster adoption? Not a conspiracy theorist here, just pointing out some fairly good timing coming out of Redmond…if timing is really all it is???
This is just more proof that DECLARED OBSOLETE software
should be placed in the public domain BY LAW. Maybe this would discurage this constant “upgrade treadmill” philosophy
of bugs ‘n’ bloat, bugs ‘n’ bloat and more bugs ‘n’ bloat that never really fix ANYTHING (Even Windows XP is still delivering its equivalant of the “blue screen of death” on a more than necessessary basis.) If you have read any of my previous posts in the article about Richard Stallman’s editorial about the SCOap opera you will know that I am a major believer in the public domain for DECLARED OBSOLETE software as one of the answers in the current war between the GPL and software patents. I beliece that it may well have to be the answer to “upgrade treadmill” exploitation of us users as well.
I hate to tell you this, but pretty much the ONLY time XP blue screens is when a driver crashes (in most cases, it’s the video driver).
Better still, it should be all released under the BSD license to all and sundry.
That way, we can all have a good laugh at the idiots who wrote the incomprehensible bloatware that kept losing track of memory used and so on and so forth … I mean, they get paid for taking our lives in their hands – we should at least get the last laugh.
there are some older hardware that is not supported in win2k. at my last job, our special cad graphics cards were not supported. At my present job, we have a large format scanner that is not supported on win2k. the scanner works just fine and there is no need to replace it just so the os can be upgraded.
They aren’t saying you must upgrade, they are dropping telephone support for the product.
You can still use the OS… I do not see why people get so bent out of shape over this, seeing where as the OS is 7yrs old now, while most other software providers will not even support products that are more than a couple of years old (provided there have been new releases in the meantime).
I’m not disagreeing with the decision, but the more relevant time frame is 3 1/2 years since NT 4 was superseded by Win2K. If you bought or upgraded your machine towards the end of 1999, NT 4 was still Microsoft’s state of the art OS. Besides, many IT departments wait until the first service pack before rolling out a new version of Windows, figuring that it would shake out the more serious bugs in the initial release.
Never tried Windows XP and never will. If I have to upgrade to a proprietary OS from Linux again it will probably be the outsourced OS/2 variant eCom Station. In fact I would even pay SCO for a “linux License” if they won their case before using this WICKED system. Doesn’t the very idea behind WinXP ‘product activation’ that you have to accept a NUMBER from a would be ONE WORLD MONOPOLY to use your operating system raise at least a tiny sense of FAMILIARITY with other Bible reading Christians out there besides myself.
Especially Revelation 13 ;-).
WinXP is just plain wicked. And here is a further little tidbit of information Microsoft would rather you not hear. “Palladium” the original name for another Microsoft control everything technology is actually the name of a LUCIFERIAN Secret Society founded by the late Confedeate General Albert Pike who was a devil worshipper and the South’s version of William T. Sherman!!! Microsoft indeed has a LOT more than just crapware and stock “watering” fraud to cover up, and alot to answer for in this world AND THE NEXT!!!