Windows XP SP2: Don't fear the reaper

CSO - An open letter to those who are distraught over the impending retirement of Windows XP SP2:

Windows XP SP2 enthusiasts, this is a sad time for you.

Microsoft, eager to get us all to use Windows 7, has announced that XP SP2's days are numbered -- at least in terms of support and security updates.

Change is hard, and this will be no exception. Microsoft will stop supporting Windows XP SP2 after July 13. That means no more security fixes on Patch Tuesday. You can soften the blow by updating to Windows XP SP3, which will be supported until April 2014. But that doesn't make this much easier. It's still a major update, and major updates are fraught with problems. It's a fact of life.

Your anxiety is made worse by what this ultimately means -- an across-the-enterprise switch to Windows 7. You can already picture the flood of help desk tickets bloating your inbox as users try to figure out how to handle this new OS. Heck, you're not sure you even know how to handle it yet.

Some of you have even developed a genuine affection for SP2, which makes this all the more painful.

Windows XP itself has been a bear of a challenge from a security perspective. We couldn't even begin to calculate the number of XP boxes that have fallen prey to malware. There are simply too many to count. Many XP machines were long ago hijacked into the expanding array of botnets plaguing the cybersphere. Microsoft made security matters worse by allowing users to have an administrator account by default, giving a treacherous amount of unrestricted access to the system's underpinnings. IT security practitioners have long lamented that if the administrator's account is cracked, the bad guys can take control and do just about anything they want. Not even the sky is the limit.

But while it didn't solve every problem, SP2 was a major improvement.

I remember the day SP2 came out -- Aug. 25, 2004 -- like it were yesterday. I had been hearing rumors the preceding weekend that it's release was imminent. Back then, the release of such things was a little less predictable than it is today, so I spent the entire weekend writing up a full package of articles about what to expect -- just in case we needed it. At the time, almost everyone I interviewed threw cold water on the news. There was no way they were going to download SP2 as quickly as Microsoft wanted them too. They planned to test it slowly and take all the time they needed.