A while back, I posted about Microsoft ramping down support for Windows 2000. Well, the situation is about to get much worse. As I learned from this article, the newest version of MS Office will not install on Windows 2000, nor will Microsoft's new media player. Now, I figure I can live without those apps quite happily for a long time. But it's not hard to see that this is just the beginning of the "big squeeze," where Microsoft starts making it very hard on its own customers who choose not to upgrade their systems. I might predict, for example, that newer devices will not include Windows 2000 driver support. This is just one way in which Microsoft could make life tough for those of us who are happy with our Windows 2000 systems.

But look closer. Microsoft is getting downright nasty in some cases. As the aforementioned article tells us, the "Windows Defender" program will not install on Windows 2000. This turns out to be an artificial limitation built into the Installshield installer program. If you are savvy enough to hack around this, the program runs just fine on Windows 2000. Microsoft is giving this program away for free, but all the Windows 2000 users get is the finger.

The article points out another nice little gotcha. Most of you have surely heard that our beloved Congress has extended the period of "daylight savings time" starting in 2007. Microsoft has announced that it will not be releasing a patch to alter the dates on which Windows 2000 systems automatically reset the clocks. For home users, this is not that burdensome; I plan to switch off the "automatic reset" feature and just change the clocks on the computers myself (the way I do all the other clocks in the house). Business customers, on the other hand, have a much greater challenge. The article provides a link to a registry hack that changes the "clock reset" dates, but it must be applied manually, one computer at a time.

For those of us who use Windows 2000 at home, Microsoft is going to force us to make a decision. We can pay the price to upgrade at least to XP, or we can suffer with our existing systems, or we can move to a different operating system. In my case, one of my systems is too old to run XP, so an OS upgrade would mean a hardware upgrade as well. We must also bear these events in mind when considering future computer purchases. If Microsoft is willing to screw its customers now, it will screw them later.

For myself, I recognize the limited usefulness of the Linux desktop, so I plan to give serious consideration to a Mac as my next computer. It supports the functions that I use most -- photo and video editing -- very well. Not having done business with Apple, Inc. for quite some time, I can't speak to the way in which they treat their customers; but I have a hard time giving my business to a company like Microsoft, which is ready to leave its customers out in the cold.