Tuesday, July 11, 2006 11:31 AM
Michael S. Kaplan
Is MSLU still supported?
Well, as the Windows 98 page says officially:
July 11, 2006 will bring a close to Extended Support for Windows 98, Windows 98 Second Edition, and Windows Me as part of the Microsoft Lifecycle Policy. Microsoft will retire public and technical support, including security updates, by this date.
Existing support documents and content, however, will continue to be available through the Microsoft Support Product Solution Center Web site. This Web site will continue to host a wealth of previous How-to, Troubleshooting, and Configuration content for anyone who may need self-service.
Microsoft is retiring support for these products because they are outdated and can expose customers to security risks. We recommend that customers who are still running Windows 98 or Windows Me upgrade to a newer, more secure Microsoft operating system, such as Windows XP, as soon as possible.
It does leave the interesting question about support for the Microsoft Layer for Unicode on Windows 95, 98, and Me Systems (MSLU). Since it only ever runs on Win9x, which is no longer supported, can UnicoWS.dll be supported?
Well, to decide that, let's see what "support" means in this context.
We have not had any security bugs reported in years, and even periodic updates were not happening much any more. So the situation in those areas would unchanged.
The MSLU newsgroup (microsoft.public.platformsdk.mslayerforunicode) has not had much traffic, but it will probably still be around (and I still watch there).
Any time someone worked with Product Support Services with an MSLU question in the past, it usually found its way to me at some point. So even if you couldn't go through PSS, you could still come here or go to the newsgroup....
And certainly if someone asks a question about MSLU here in the Suggestion Box, I'd try to answer it. Especially if were an interesting question!
So, I guess you could say that MSLU is as supported as it has been for the last few years, with whatever meager level you can ascribe to my efforts.... :-)
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