Windows 7 may be the talk of the town these days, but a great many people, especially companies, still run the venerable forefathers, Windows XP SP2 and Windows 2000. However, this will now be a little more dangerous, as today marks the official end of their support life cycle.

Windows 2000 has now been on the market for a little over a decade, and all versions of the operating system will now cease to be supported. As for XP, only those who are still using Service Pack 2 need to be worried. The massive update brought a huge number of changes to the popular OS when it was released in the summer of 2004, but was superseded by Service Pack 3 in 2008.

The fact that support has been retired means that Microsoft will no longer issue security updates or hot-fixes for those operating systems. Therefore, the company will not patch any security vulnerabilities. Over time, it’s likely that PCs running an unsupported OS will become increasingly open to attacks from malicious software.

The solution for any home or business users out there running XP SP2 will simply be to upgrade to Service Pack 3, which will be supported until April 2014. For those still clinging to any version of Windows 2000, the only option left is to upgrade to a newer operating system. Hopefully, any institutions will have already taken the necessary steps to move users onto a supported OS and won’t be scrambling to make provisions now. For those who haven’t, we recommend that you start scrambling immediately.