Security threats Toolkit
Story: McAfee: Businesses 'leery' of Vista
XP security support will continue until 2014
I'm not sure where people are getting the idea that security support for XP will end shortly. Here's the official policy, from http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifepolicy.
"Microsoft will also provide Extended Support for the 5 years following Mainstream support or for 2 years after the second successor product (N+2) is released, whichever is longer."
Extended support follows mainstream support and does not include hotfixes and service packs, but it does include security updates, paid support incidents and, if you sign an extended hotfix agreement, which a lot of large customers do, pretty well any kind of support you'd like, including hotfixes.
According to the MS lifecycle, XP will be in mainstream support until April 2009 (probably within a year of the release of Vista's successor), and in Extended Support, WITH security updates, until April 2014. That's assuming that the replacement for Vista (the N+2 version of Windows) is released before 2012. If they take longer, XP support will last longer.
See http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?LN=en-us&x=10&y=14&p1=3223 for the dates.
Al cook
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