i would hope that they would go for a patch which removes the need for activation - i've read about several old games which have had a patch issued to remove the need for activation, i'm guessing they'll do the same... but i can't see that for years.
the big box shifters are *still* selling pcs aimed at the business market tagged "windows 7 professional / windows xp professional twinload" so there are clearly many companies out there still putting windows xp on their images.
for me, sticking with windows server 2003 and xp would be fantastic. i know it like the back of my hand and it's great, it works, but sadly we have to move on.
the biggest problem is that many of the group policy objects will need to be changed, with is a bit of a fecker.
at the moment i've got two organisational units in the active directory - one for xp boxes one for windows 7. they are exactly the same except the windows 7 ou doesn't deploy a couple of windows xp specific software packages which don't work correctly on windows 7 and that seems to be working ok so far.
i've also got a couple of really shite applications which i don't think are supported in server 2008, i think i'm going to end up having to virtualise a windows 2000 install just to keep it going
RIP Windows 2000: 17 February 2000 - 13 July 2010
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Dr Lobster*
- Posts: 2107
- Joined: Sat 30 Aug, 2003 20.14
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Neil Jones
- Posts: 661
- Joined: Thu 11 Sep, 2003 20.03
- Location: West Midlands
Microsoft stated from the outset with Windows XP that when it reaches the end of its life, steps would be taken to disable it (activation, not XP 
)
More likely, however, since I suspect that because XP, Vista, Office and 7 (and a bunch of other future things no doubt) all probably go through the same centralised servers/systems, you could theoretically do nothing and XP will just activate as it does now.
At some point far into the future when Microsoft, who must log these things and know exactly how many times an XP activation occurs, a Vista activation occurs, etc, would look at the logs and come to a decision: Nobody's activating XP any longer, so any further requests get sent down the >NULL tunnel (kudos to anybody who knows what that means) and just send back a "yeah, whatever" message back.
)More likely, however, since I suspect that because XP, Vista, Office and 7 (and a bunch of other future things no doubt) all probably go through the same centralised servers/systems, you could theoretically do nothing and XP will just activate as it does now.
At some point far into the future when Microsoft, who must log these things and know exactly how many times an XP activation occurs, a Vista activation occurs, etc, would look at the logs and come to a decision: Nobody's activating XP any longer, so any further requests get sent down the >NULL tunnel (kudos to anybody who knows what that means) and just send back a "yeah, whatever" message back.
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Lightoftruth
- Posts: 12
- Joined: Wed 07 Jul, 2010 16.50
Bye Windows 2000. Even though I'm a home user so never got the chance to use it 