Windows 2000: Do you think Second Life Should Stop Support for Windows 2000

Seriously, if you are going to support Windows 2000, can we also have builds that work on NT4? I have been wanting an excuse to blow the dirt off my DEC Alpha box that used to run Windows...

That's easy to say, but you don't have any stats to support it. That's hardly your fault. It's not like LL releases that sort of information.

SL is dependent on a lot of software, including third-party drivers which may or may not be getting fixed by the vendors on Win2000 any more.



Market share.



The latest Linux kernel is less than two months old. The latest Ubuntu distribution is never more than six months old. Linux is only "old" if you've refused to upgrade for years.

And LL only supports MacOS X back to version 10.4, which came out in April 2005, so I'm surprised they're even asking. I suspect the decision was already made in that case and in this case beforehand.

...but let the open source folks build their own if they want. In other words, turn it over to the FOSS community. If there is a need, someone will pick up the ball that you dropped.

With the very real economic problems facing the U.S. and added the fact that our nation has an irresponsible monetary policy (read inflation), you need to keep your costs down. Only support officially the most used OSes and respective versions.

Again, look to the FOSS community to support ancient and little used versions.

Honestly, why would you want to support a 7yrs-old OS? Drop Windows XP support!




No, not really. As mentioned before, Windows XP was released in 2001. XP is old too. If Windows 2000 is an "edge case", then so is Windows XP.




Would you like to know WHY Windows 2000 gives you trouble? No, it's not a fault of the operating system, it is because of poorly written drivers, faulty hardware, or VERY poorly written software. For example, terminate and disable startup of RTHDCPL.exe (Realtek HD sound manager program) if you have it and most crashing will be solved.




Well then let's cut off Windows XP support in April next year.




Uh, the release date is what makes Windows XP also outdated, you know.




Windows XP came out in 2001. They should drop that too. Right? Are you surprised they are still supporting Windows XP? Before you say market share again, what was Mac's market share?

I absolutely agree. And the example of OS X 10.3.x also shows that people will be able to log into SL with an older viewer for quite some time. As long as older OSes work with older viewers, please concentrate the resources on projects that benefit the 99.9% of users that use modern systems.

And if something really breaks in the future, you might still look at the usage statistics then and consider to offer a compatibility patch for older viewers on OS 10.3 or Windows 2K.

Hi everybody, thanks for the responses thus far. One thing we want to be clear about is that we are not trying to make SL incompatible with Win2k by any stretch. The fact is that after we stop supporting Win2k SL will continue to work with the OS for some time. We will just no longer be programming or testing to ensure compatibility, and I think for the most part we are in agreement that Win2k is old enough to stop supporting. We are ready to let those Lindens work on our other supported Operating Systems. We wanted to give our residents notice before stopping of support, but we expect official win2k support to end in 60 days.

They already know how many people are using W2K -- the blog post said 1/10 of 1 percent.

I say drop it, I think they should spend that time optimizing SL for the latest version(s) of Windows, OS X and Linux.

I have no problem with you removing Windows 2000 from support - it was alway Mircosoft's weakest product - a poor replacement for Windows 1998 and a poor pre cursor to Windows XP.

Yes, end support for Win2K.

You're thinking of Windows ME. Don't relate Windows 2000 to Windows ME. These are completely different operating systems.

Please drop 2K.

MS stopped support for Win2K a long time ago. I'd expect software to support the current and previous version of an OS, no more. That means Vista and XP on Windows. For sure, people can still run SL on older OS, just can't submit a support ticket (or won't get a fix) if they have problems with reliability of the SL client. The only exception would be if a majority of users were still on an outdated OS, as will likely happen when MS releases Windows 7 - XP will be popular probably until at least Windows 7 service pack 1, 2011-ish.

But that's just my 2ps worth and I'm not affected by the decision. The only thing I would say is that 60 days notice isn't very long. MS gives advance warning in months, if not years. I think 3 months is the minimum notice you should give before stopping support for something as big as the OS.

Windows 2000 is still on Microsoft's extended support period, and in a few months Windows XP will be too.

You're probably thinking of Windows ME. I've considered 2000 to be MS's most stable release to date, and 2000 Server is alive and well in many shops.

But I do think support of 2000 with SL should be dropped. Heck, Vista is almost a year old now. I say concentrate on optimizing (the windows versions of) SL for those.

Seems a sensible thing to do - it's just not reasonable to expect continued support of older OS forever!

Sure end it.. You got my vote

But why the hell was this posted on the grid status page and not the blog? This was hardly an issue with the grid status. And the blog will reach more people..

Simply answer is NO do not stop support for win2k

The end of full support makes a OS outdated not the release date. XP is the most common Windows OS on the market, many companys runs it, because it needs less resources than Vista. Thats why security updates are provided till 2014 (for Vista Ultimate the full support ends in 2012, funny uh? Only Business and Enterprise have a full support till 2017).

And by the way, it's totally senseless to run Windows 2000 on a dualcore computer, because it's a complete 32bit OS and will slow down new hardware. Windows XP you can get also in a 64bit version. Please keep in mind that Windows 2000 and XP 32bit can't support 4Gb RAM (address limitation: 3,5Gb used only).

Other points are a bad openGL support, bad driver support, bad memory management (buffer overruns never really fixed in Windows 2000). Windows 2000 was a good OS till SP3 for XP was deployed. After that XP was more stable then Windows 2000 ever were. Maybe you learned to live with all the problems on Win2k, but i won't have a buggy OS.

Finally I'm running Windows Vista 64bit SP1 with 8GB RAM and it runs better than XP - also the performance is better (after turning off all not needed effects like Aero and some services).

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I think all users who vote "No" have alot of bots running and they will loose them. So lets kickout the bots with that

Windows XP is about to enter it's extended support period, just like Windows 2000 is in.




This is all completely wrong. 32-bit has nothing to do with dual-core support. Windows 2000 and Windows XP Professional, both 32-bit versions, support SMP (multi-core/multi-processor systems).

32-bit has to do with how much memory they support -- and that is up to 4 GB of memory. Not 3.5. This is 4 GB, but video memory is addressed before system memory is so you get 4GB minus what your video card uses, if your video card has 512 MB of memory then you indeed only get up to 3.5 GB of system memory, but keep in mind they make video cards that use 64 MB, 128 MB, 256 MB, and even 1 GB, so you can't just say it's exactly 3.5 GB that you're left with.

While I agree that 64-bit is better for memory and possibly some types of complex math code such as brute forcing passwords, it's not really necessary until computers really need more than 4 GB of addressable memory (although it can't hurt to make 64-bit a standard in the mean time to prepare for that).




Ha ha ha. No. Windows 2000 has pretty much the same great memory management as Windows XP. OpenGL can be updated. The last drivers released for it are still great.




Problems on win2k? The imaginary ones you made up? Because there are no real problems that are a fault of the OS itself.

I'm a little surprised we're even asking about this. Major components like Quicktime for Windows 2000 have gone a full year without security updates. This, despite well-publicized remote exploits. That MS still provides security updates doesn't mean third-parties do similar.

When responding to this thread, remember that all Win2K QA is done at the expense of QA time spent elsewhere. Likewise, being locked into an older Win2K-compatible Windows SDK may well be holding back some stability and performance enhancements in later Microsoft SDKs.

That was easy enough to get around, we 2000 users (most of us, I assume) uninstalled Quicktime and began requesting that LL use something else, like VLC, but there hasn't been much of a response yet.

Personally i think dropping support for win2k users is not a smart move. Win2k and XP are sister OS. The core of xp is winnt aka win2k winnt. Now if your saying you are going to stop helping peeps with win2k issues and sl then ok but for not supporting it in your viewer then I think it is a bad idea.
If it were my suggestion I would spend time working out the buggs in the current viewer. The bells and wistles are nice. But id rather have a viewer that works then " ooooo I can change the skin and make it blue ".

Listen to this man. Folks that are running W2K really need to catch up (or stop clogging up the network resources). I too run Vista, and although I do like to be refreshed with a trip to our XP-based computer lab, it is relatively stable and efficient. Sure, there are some issues - constant UAC comes to mind, along with the folder structure that I still have yet to grasp (Application Data -> AppData, My Documents -> Documents, etc) - but nonetheless, the amount of W2K users is so insignificant in this case that the answer is obvious. "Oh, but it's 2,000 customers you're talking about!" Well, true. 2,000 customers, most of whom - no, the overwhelming majority of whom don't pay Linden Labs a single penny, and who probably just use that computer for a bot account.

So, yes, cut the cord on W2K.

I think SL should be available for as many OS out there possible, then SL would have a wider range of cliental..those few that do currently still use windows 2000 may also be paying customers.

I -think- in the long run SL would loose more then gain, because they will be loosing those paying customers..

i support the plan to move on away from windows 2000 and devote more time and expertise to current problems

glad to see this excellent proposal