All StarNet desktop products come with one year of Maintenance. Customers have the option of extending maintenance for one, two or three years at a cost of 20%, 36% and 54% respectively of the product list price. Licenses that are under Maintenance enjoy the following benefits:

• Unlimited e-mail and phone support during West Coast business hours
• Engineering support to solve problems and implement requested features
• Access to our online, searchable Knowledge Database that answers most questions customers typically ask
• Free upgrades to all new patches and full releases issued during the maintenance contract period
• Free phone and web conference support (WebEx, Bomgard, etc.) used to resolve installation issues and technical problems

Why keeping licenses under maintenance is a good idea:

Unlike applications build for one OS platform or another, PC X server constantly deal with a host of changes coming from multiple directions that can affect the performance of the remote display of Linux and Unix desktops and applications on Windows desktops. Some of these include:

• New Windows releases usually require a number of updates to be made. This has been the case with every major Windows release and we anticipate this to be true for the upcoming Windows 8 release (client and server versions)

• Linux and Unix distributors constantly make bug fixes and add new features to their particular distribution. Rarely, if ever, do they take into account that many users are connecting to Linux and Unix systems from remote desktops by way of an X Windows emulator. As a result a lot of our engineering time is spent each year updating X-Win32 when something that used to work with one of those OSes does not with their latest release. Maintenance will ensure you can continue to use X-Win32 after you have upgraded your Linux/Unix servers with a new OS update.

• Every year, X.Org releases one or more updates of the X11 code with bug fixes and new features. X servers need to be updated constantly for these changes. In the past year alone, we added support for the new X Composite, X Cinerama and RandR Extensions that have been released by X.Org.

• Developers of X11 applications also constantly make changes to their programs and frequently poorly written code slips in that causes problems for X servers. StarNet has always been able to develop fixes and work-arounds to compensate for these problems.

A good deal of StarNet's sales come from companies that have been using other X servers that encountered one problem or another as a result of one of the above scenarios. These companies usually find that X-Win32 already has fixes for these issues or our engineers are able to quickly fix them. 

StarNet has created a state-of-the-art engineering system. No longer do customers have to wait months for a new releases that fixes a problem or adds a feature they requested. Our system allows bug fixes and minor new features to be added to the current version and have it released to all customers immediately as a new "build." The Update Tool build in X-Win32 automatically notifies customers when a new version is released.  

For all these reasons StarNet customers enjoy great value from the StarNet maintenance program.