South Carolina Photography Guild

Windows 98, the oldest operating system still in use in business environments to any serious degree has officially seen its’ last day of update support.  Microsoft announced the event back in January and that event is now upon us.  What does this mean for photographers?  Nothing really, if you are a digital shooter, since you probably are running an Operating System more current than the 98 flavor of Windows.  Having said that, there may still be some film shooters that have a dark room and an old 98 box somewhere that houses a few applications.  Whether those receive critical updates or not could also be meaningless to that type of usage, but don’t expect any support from Microsoft for Windows 98 from here on out - not even paid support.  It’s quite a landmark date actually given the usual life cycle for Microsoft in the past had been 5 years from start to end.

What may be more telling is the willingness of Microsoft to cut the umbilical cord on such legacy OS’s because technically, Windows 2000 is now a legacy operating system.  (Life cycle was supposed to end last year.)  Given the extensions to Windows 98 and the large scale enterprise usage of Windows 2000 (governments use this), and the fact that this is probably the most stable operating system ever produced by Microsoft, the likelihood of terminating support even in an 8 year time frame is unlikely.

What may be more likely is to see 2000 support starting to see signs of weakening around the 2010 mark since virtually any computer would be replaced within that time frame (10 years).  Having said that, with XP already showing its wear and tear though, and the buildup we are seeing for Windows Vista, who knows what Microsoft has up it’s sleeve.