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What would you ask Michael?
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-110

Bring back Windows 2000, NT. Government customers are still buying Win2K - why can't I get it from Dell.

-110 points posted to Software, Small Business by jmxz 05/10/07

Many of your customers are satisfied with the software infrastructure they have, and don't want forced changes to their infrastructure. Some of those are even running older versions like 2000 or NT.

Government customers are still buying Windows 2000 for their infrastructure today.
http://www.ideastorm.com/article/show/66448< a great testament to your hardware that your machines from the 90s are still running fine today (my Dimension XPS R350 from '98 runs just fine) . But when these machines eventually need replacement it's a pain that all the software will have to be migrated to some OS and will probably need lots of work getting it to work again on the new OS - whether it be Vista or Linux+Wine.

Microsoft is still helping their customers dependent on the old infrastructure::
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q128465

"Windows NT 3.51 Workstation and Server U.S. Service Pack 5
Service Pack 5 is available as a single self-extracting archive file for Intel (x86), MIPS, ALPHA, and Power PC-based computers.
Last Review : November 1, 2006"
If even Microsoft realizes it's important to continue helping customers with infrastructure dependent on these older OS's; Dell should realize this too and could help its customers by continuing to ship the OS's upon which many company's operations still depend. Dell's an important enough customer to Microsoft, if Dell asks for it Microsoft should sell it to them. If Microsoft says you don't need it and to sell Vista instead, point out to them that they're still helping customers with that infrastructure - and it's only fair that you can too.

If your business still has Win2000 or WinNT systems, vote this up to avoid forced upgrades.

Bring back Win2000, NT, and ME (just kidding on that one) so I never need to learn what software's incompatible with Vista.

bennish
05/10/07		 nice idea. dunno about nt...

win2000's great. i guess the main prob is that its support will end soon i guess?

there is some thing for getting win2000 educationally, i think?
jmxz
05/10/07		 bennish:

Re: "dunno about nt":

I'm told that Nasdaq still runs NT on their high-end servers (post NT Windows did run on MIPS, and Nasdaq's main servers have MIPS CPUs): http://h20223.www2.hp.com/NonStopComputing/cache/120553-0-0-225-121.html?jump...

Re: "support will end soon"

Note from the link in the Idea that Microsoft still helps customers with NT 3.51. As long as there are customers important enough to care about (and Dell counts), support will continue.
tleavit
05/11/07		 W2K is no longer supported by Microsoft. I still have about 25 PC on my network with W2K and they are starting to be problemtic becasue of this. For example, we had to visit each one for the DST change.

I'll tell you what, if Microsoft really wanted to be though of as cool by the crazy people out there, they would offer the world W2K for free. Open up the code a bit for open source support. Allow anyone in the world to drop it on their PC's for free.
jmxz
05/11/07		 tleavit:

"W2K is no longer supported by Microsoft."
All depends on the customer, I guess. Rumors are they're still supporting NT on MIPS for Nasdaq.
For a customer as important as Dell I think they'd bring back support.

"I still have about 25 PC ... For example, we had to visit each one for the DST change."
Yipes. You're kidding. I'd have hoped that even after the OS vendor stops support someone would pick up and provide ways of automatically administering updates like that.

"Open up the code a bit for open source support. "
They can't. Much of it uses patents and other IP from third party companies (including Sun) that Microsoft had to pay billions just to use internally. There's no way they'd get those companies to let them open source the code.
 
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