Support for Microsoft Windows 2000 and XP SP2 to end by July

Microsoft offers support for its products for 5 years and extended support for 10 years.

July 13^th would be the last day that Microsoft would offer extended support for its former operating systems Windows 2000 and Windows XP SP2. This would mean paid support, support assistance and security updates for these versions would be discontinued according to the company.

However, for another a year, self-help online support, which includes Microsoft Knowledge Base articles, FAQs and troubleshooting tools, would be available.

The users of Windows 2000 would have to migrate to more recent version of Microsoft Windows or live with no support from Microsoft. Microsoft has a Windows 2000 End-of-Support Center with advice on migrating to Windows 7 (for desktops) or Windows Server 2003, 2008, or 2008 R2 (for servers).

For the users of Windows XP SP2, or earlier, there is a free option available to continue Microsoft Support. And this would be to simply upgrade to SP3 which can be done by Internet Explorer Windows Update utility.

Google Revamps Search

Google recently optimized its search engine to boost search result relevance.  This feature allows the users to refine their search results more diligently. Users can now filter by content type and obtain more relevant search results from Google. The search giant through this strives to keep its search smart compared to rivals Microsoft Bing and Yahoo. These changes began rolling out on the 5^th May across 37 languages and lives in the left-hand panel. 

The new Look-and-Feel of Google Search

The new side search panel brings the most relevant search tools and refinements for the search query. The Universal Search, the Search Options panel, and Google Squared launched over the past three years have been brought together to power the side panel.

Universal Search helps to find the most relevant types of results for the search query. The top section of the new left-hand panel builds on Universal Search by suggesting the most relevant genres of results for the query and letting one to seamlessly switch to these different types of results. The “Everything” option gets the different types of results integrated into the main results but the user now can also easily switch to just the particular type of results.

The expandable Search Options panel launched earlier brought many rich slice-and-dice tools to search. The new left-hand navigation showcases these tools and enables one to get a different view of the results. Just in case somebody wants to see only the images from each of the results or just the news? The options on the left will suggest the tools that are relevant and helpful to the query.

Google Squared (available on Google Labs) helps in finding and comparing entities. The “Something different” feature has been developed on the technology in Google Squared to find other entities that are related to the query, so that one can easily explore not only the results for the current query but other related topics as well.