By Jeremy C. Wright, Staff Writer
Tuesday, 30 November 2004 16:54 EST

Microsoft announced today that its previous plans to release a 5th service pack for Windows 2000 were not in customers’ best interests. Instead, the Redmond-based company has decided to issue a collection of current updates, thus enabling customers to update their machines more quickly.

The release of the “update rollup” will be sometime next summer, Microsoft said in a posting on its website.

"Microsoft talked to many customers about their plans for maintaining their Windows 2000 deployments," the software maker said in a FAQ on its site. "The most frequent requests were for Microsoft to make it as easy as possible to keep Windows 2000 systems up-to-date from a security perspective and to reduce the amount of predeployment testing (customers) would need to perform."

The update collection will include fewer fixes than a service pack, with most of those having already been released separately.

The update is planned to be the last major update for Windows 2000, which is still the most widely used server OS in the world.

Microsoft had originally planned to release a fairly major service pack for the OS which was to include the updates, several new Terminal Services features and a suite of new tools integrating Microsoft’s newest management platforms.

"Because Microsoft believes the Update Rollup will meet the needs of customers better than a new service pack, there will be no Service Pack 5 (SP5) for Windows 2000," the software maker said. "Therefore, SP4 becomes the final service pack for Windows 2000."

The company did not say exactly what will be included in the update collection but did say it will contain "all security-related updates produced for Windows 2000 between the time SP4 was released and the time when Microsoft finalizes the contents of the Update Rollup," as well as a small number of updates not related to security.