XP Home Edition Support Extended to 2008

[Osiris]

For the past 2 weeks, the Windows community has been buzzing with news that Microsoft was scheduled to halt support for XP Home at the end of this year. (Apparently, Microsoft never expected that its next Windows release would take so long to ship.) Well, the crisis is over.

Microsoft this week revealed that it has extended support for XP Home (and a few other XP editions whose support was also scheduled to be terminated this year) to "2 years after the next version of [Windows Vista] is released," according to the company. If Vista ships on schedule at the end of the year, that means that Microsoft will continue supporting XP Home through late 2008. That's not too shabby.

Note that Microsoft's business-oriented Windows products have much lengthier support life cycles. Microsoft is supporting XP Professional, for example, through 2011.

 

[talldude123]

windows xp home edition should be supported until at least 2010. Look how long windows 98/2000 were supported..practically 6 years!

 

[AnthraX]

Well that's always nice to hear. Microsoft does care about consumers and not just pushing their new products and making money. Or so it would seem.

 

[Tyler1989]

The cyle is supposed to be 5 years. Though extended support doesn't include new service packs if I'm correct so I don't think we will see Official SPs for Home or Areo themes for it but with Home and Pro so closly related who knows.

 

[Osiris]

We're in this for the long haul," Microsoft Business unit President Jeff Raikes said on Monday when Microsoft announced that they would be introducing a $100 USD discount and 1 year of support with the purchase of any of their Small Business Accounting 2006 software.

Microsoft Small Business Accounting software is similar to Intuit's well know QuickBooks program. In simple terms, it is a "Money Management Program", it allows small businesses to keep track of sales, purchases, and overall balances.

Microsoft decided to create the discount when they noticed how low their retail sales were. According to NPD, an organization that tracks retail sales, Intuit had 93.7% of November's sales, Microsoft on the other hand only had 1.3%, the other 3.7% went to Peachtree.

The discount will be available starting on April 30th to such major retailers as Best Buy, CompUSA, Office Depot and Staples. Dell is also planning on making the software available with their PC's.