NT 4 users speak out!
Posted on Jul 8, 2004 at 11:24 AM by John Foley
If you’re wondering how people are dealing with Windows NT 4.0’s end of support, I have some brand new evidence to share. Following InformationWeek’s June 28 story “Millions Of NT 4.0 Systems Face Phaseout, we decided to run a mini-survey to gauge just how much work remains to be done in migrating off Microsoft’s 8-year-old operating system. Of the 551 people who completed our survey yesterday, only 25% have completed their NT 4.0 migrations. That leaves 38% to be done by year’s end and 34% to finish the job sometime later. (Only 3% said their companies never used NT 4.0.) For more, read the feedback from some of our readers.
“Many of us have costly applications that depend on NT 4.0 for support from vendors. We don't dare drop NT 4.0 since vendor support is critical. This "problem" is mostly related to highly customized applications and limited in the number of installations.”
Professor
“5 year old, 40 NT4 workstations and 2 NT4 servers still humming along. It is hard to justify new desktops when these are working just fine. I expect to be 'forced' to replace them when new application software dictates it.”
Accounting supervisor
“We migrated from NT to Active Directory mid last year, but we still have some remote offices that are on NT, and therefore not on our global Domain. Our plan is to move them all to Windows 2000 this year. We also have one server in the US that is still NT, which will also be migrated this year.”
CIO
“NT 4.0 is THE most stable operating system I've ever used. I hate to see it go away, but the IT support folks need to reduce the diversity. Too bad.”
Title not included
“Still don't have the time to learn and properly migrate to Active Directory. AD is too complex for a "quick" switch-over. Windows NT 4.0 domain works just fine in our current lab environment; no technical reason to switch. The only NT 4.0 machines we still have are our PDC and BDC; all other servers are Windows2000 or XP.”
Title not included
“We've replaced NT 4 with XP (SP1) on the main computer for the company. But we're keeping NT 4 on the IBM ThinkPad for backward compatibility testing.”
Company president
“Will not replace Win NT 4.0 server and stations. Some import software are running on it to do the job. It is matter of let it die when the software are not useful.”
Technical principal
“Starting this year, we are purchasing new machines with XP on them. Gradually we are phasing out NT systems, but won't be upgrading and existing OSes.
System administrator
“We will probably be using at least two to three Windows NT 4.0 Servers for several more years, due mainly to some products we use that don't do well on AD.”
Network manager
“All newer servers run Win 2000 or Win 2003. However, we have been hesitant to migrate several older IBM servers (that were preconfigured with NT 4) off of NT 4.”
CIO
“Yes we are replacing our windows NT 4.0 servers with Linux. We have no intention of using the latest insecurity, the most vendor lockin servers from Microsoft.”
Network administrator
“We replaced our last NT 4.0 system in early 2002, and are already planning the replacement of our 2000 Servers. Companies still running NT at this late date are really behind the 8 ball.”
IT engineer
“XP has been seamless change. I think it is faster and works well with Java and the WebLogic Server.”
Analyst/programmer
“NT had a good run - I'm sorry to see it go only in that it became a standard, well-understood and workable OS, with a wide base of expertise available, and I fear it will be a while before I'm as familiar with XP as I am with NT. Of course, by then we'll all be switching to Longhorn or its successor.”
LAN administrator
“NT 4.0 just plain lacks dynamic capabilities.”
LAN administrator
“Only replacing as we upgrade applications and/or naturally replace hardware.”
IT manager
“We skipped 2000 entirely: we have completed an XP roll-out back in May. We're using a standard desktop image, roaming profiles and Novell Zenworks to ensure our users can login to their workspace from any workstation on the network.”
Senior IT executive
“Although we do have two servers running Windows 2000 Server, our PDC is still running NT 4.0 and Exchange 5.5 on it - both of which have been running problem free for years. Being a small company (I'm the entire IT department) I find it hard to rationalize spending resources to replace something that is running perfectly well with no problems simply because Microsoft tells me to do so.”
MIS manager
“I am not using any of the microsoft tools any longer for developing software. Every thing is being done on Linux(KDE IDE). After years of using Visual Studio and finding too many unstable problems with it I had just had enough frustration caused by trouble shooting microsoft's BUGS.”
VP
“I'm frustrated that Microsoft hasn't done more to assist enterprise customers to eliminate WinNT from our corporation!”
Service manager
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