Yep, we still have 3000 plus desktops to upgrade, it has been a long time coming but time to twist the knuckle screws on our developers!

Win2K has been working fine for years and continues to operate as a strong work horse.

Pay lots of money to upgrade the O/S, take all the sites offline for at least a day to upgrade the server (and I won't even get into the logistics of it being 1,200 miles away!), lose mission critical software (or pay yet more money to upgrade or switch) because they aren't compatible with Win2003? Ain't gonna happen!

Win2K (...) continues to operate as a strong work horse.

Until the first vulnerability affecting it is found and left unpatched. I really do not follow your argument at all.

You are using an eleven year-old operating system in a mission-critical environment with zero vendor-support, keeping faith in an outdated, unsupported product based merely on past performance.

The vendor (MS) announced years ago the end-of-life plans for their product, and you have done nothing so far in terms of planning for the end of security hotfixes. There have been two major Windows server OS updates to which you have not migrated. Shouldn't you have started planning this a long time ago?

Seriously, this is like riding down the freeway with the brakes cut on your car - you'll be just fine... until a sudden event puts you in serious trouble. If you choose a proprietary system, then you need to play by that system's support cycle. I'm sorry, but running a live Windows 2000 server today is insane.

running a live Windows 2000 server today is insane

If it's local, not mission critical, and not directly hooked to the Internet then you might have reason to continue running Win2K. Otherwise encyclo is spot on. If you must run Win2K then perhaps you should look into virtualizing it within a modern variant of Windows.

I honestly don't understand people lagging behind on 10+ year old operating systems like Win 2K and XP, it just boggles my mind.

The longer you wait to make the transition the harder it is to find all of the transitional software typically easy to find when an OS is first released.

Not only that, but many companies decide whether to provide upgrades to their products based on market demand and when a significant portion of the market refuses to budge sometimes they don't upgrade those programs and later, that mission critical software no longer exists, company gone, POOF!

I can understand it's not cheap to upgrade 3K machines, all the logistical issues, but delaying so long and putting up with all the technological problems inherent with an old OS would seem in the end to be costlier than the perceived savings in the first place.

For instance, old 2K and XP have all sorts of issues natively supporting some USB devices that Win 7 knows all about and simply plugs 'n plays.

Seriously, my old Commodore-64 would still be solidly cranking away running a BBS if I plugged it in, but who would want to?

I'll upgrade when they get the bugs worked out of THOSE versions. :)

As I mentioned, the application software doesn't work on new versions of Windows. (Well, it works somewhat on 2003 from what I have tested so far, but support for that will probably end in 3 years anyway.) When the next version of the application software came out, I tried running it (luckily on a test server) and it was a total mess. All of the code would have to be completely rewritten and re-translated.

upgrade outfacing, wait on the infacing... always works... until the two can no longer communicate with each other.

I agree that upgrade and life cycle should be followed, but gimme a break... sometimes it just ain't necessary!

I recently "upgraded" from Windows 2000 running stand alone to Windows 2000 running in a virtual machine on a Win7 laptop. The problem is that in the work where I am in (industrial automation), changes go much slower than in the rest of the world and running systems will easily function 15 or 20 years without being modified. I have still two MS-DOS systems to maintain for example and a running laptop with Windows 95 to run software which doesn't like to run in the protected environment of Windows NT and higher.