Online criminals are scanning the Internet and attacking Windows 2000 machines that haven't had a recent Windows Media Service patch installed, Symantec said Wednesday.

Microsoft offers support for its products for five years and extended support for another five years. That time will soon be up for Windows 2000 (desktop and server) and Windows XP SP2: July 13 is the last day that extended support will be available.

Microsoft has re-released a buggy update that didn't properly protect some of its Windows 2000 users from a security flaw.

Microsoft took the unusual step today and skipped patching one of the vulnerabilities addressed in its monthly security update, saying that crafting a fix was "infeasible."

Mozilla Corp. is considering dropping support for Windows 2000 and the earliest versions of XP when it ships the follow-up to Firefox 3.5 in 2010, online discussions show.

Just a day after downplaying the vulnerability that caused it to issue an out-of-cycle patch last week, Microsoft late Monday warned customers that exploit code had gone public and is being used in additional attacks.

Solid-state disk (SSD) drive architecture can play a big role in how fast a computer boots up and performs. But how big a role the SSDs play -- and how much faster an operating system is -- depends as much on the operating system as on the drive. Although none of the mainstream operating systems now in use have been optimized to work better with SSDs, some do natively work more efficiently than others, according to storage experts.

June 25, 1998, and June 30, 2008, marked two important milestones in Microsoft's evolution of the Windows OS -- the passing of the torch from Windows 95 to Windows 98, and the less seemly transition from XP to Vista.