The discontinuation of Equipt is actually a bit different, since it's not actually expiring, but rather being 'ended' on an arbitrary date of April 30th, 2009 by Microsoft.
http://www.microsoft.com/equipt/default.aspxThough the sales of Equipt have already ended and the product itself has just ended support, there's really nothing on the PC itself that has changed. The issue will be how the Equipt backend servers are instructed to deal with the changes, or even if they are.
If the servers are just left alone, then the subscriptions might continue until they would normally expire. If they are changed to force the expiration of all subscriptions, then the epiration status may change abruptly for everyone, which is the way the announcement makes it sound. However, if they simply shutdown the backend servers then the the situation is even more unclear, since at some point the copies of Equipt will become confused by this and begin to complain.
I suspect they may have decided to provide a short 'grace period' after the official April 30th date to allow last minute copies of the free replacement Office Home & Student to reach the last few customers, though this is just speculation on my part. Though I do expect that at some point they may expire all copies of Equipt on purpose to notify those users who may not have received the announcement via email.
OneCareBear
Windows OneCare Forum Moderator
