Windows XP support life cycle

Posted Sunday, July 30, 2006 3:05 PM by bill
following on from talk of Vista, I thought I'd take a look at exactly when support for XP finishes.
 
Mainstream support will end two years after the next version of this product is released.
Extended support will end five years after mainstream support ends.
That's for XP Professional. Strangely enough, for Windows XP Home, there's no mention of Extended support !!  (hopefully that's just an omission, but it could well be Microsoft's intent as they have different support policies for consumer and business products :( ) One would think that if they have the patches for XP Professional, they'd make them available to home users too, but it isn't written as so :( 
 
XP Tablet PC is listed the same as XP Pro :)
 
The good thing is that "Extended support" as far as I can tell is all people really need from support with a mature product like XP.  That means windows update would continue to work for at least the next 7 years !!  (unless ***maybe*** if you have XP Home ????)
 
Hmmm… now surely with talk of shorter product cycles, that means there will be at least one or maybe two versions of Windows after Vista before XP support comes to an end.  I think I'll have to remove the "end of support" for XP as being a compelling reason to upgrade to Vista.
 
 
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