Windows XP Support Deal Not Renewed By UK Government, Leaves PCs Open To Attack

girlmad writes: The government's one-year £5.5m Windows XP support deal with Microsoft has not been extended, sources have told V3, despite thousands of computers across Whitehall still running the ancient software, leaving them wide open to cyber attacks. It's still unclear when all government machines will be migrated to a newer OS.

Comments

Re:Maybe they will move to court instead?

[Xest]

Probably more worrying is the fact that much of our military are still using IE6.

Re:Maybe they will move to court instead?

[hairyfeet]

You want to know what is sad? When I'm sitting there bored at the shop I have installed Windows 7 on some pretty ancient pieces of crap I end up with on trade ins and ya know what? As long as its got a GB of RAM it'll run just fine, 10 minutes turning off any services they do not need and it'd run better than XP. I seriously doubt we are talking last PIIIs and first gen P4s in the British government, if my own local government (who had all theirs switched by cutoff, ended up with a mountain I needed to refurb) are any indication what you'd be seeing is a ton of first gen Core 2 Duos, Athlon X2s, maybe if they were really cheap (like our streets dept) some Pentium Ds.....all of which will run Windows 7, hell Windows 10 just fine.

As some here know just to see if Windows 10 was gonna be a Vista piggie or a "7 sweetie" I grabbed the absolute weakest portable I have, a 2011 AMD Bobcat netbook I use for service calls. For those that don't know what an AMD Bobcat is its a chip that was designed to compete with Intel Atom when the netbook hype was in full swing (and ironically ended up being the APU for the XB1 and PS4 with its successor Jaguar) and has performance roughly equal to a last generation Atom+Nvidia ION setup so we are talking a REALLY weak chip. How does the newest Windows 10 builds run on such a weak chip? It runs just fine,takes less time to boot than Win 7 and once I'm on the desktop its all smooth sailing.

So there really is no excuse for paying something like $15 million bucks just to extend Windows XP (which lets be honest folks it was NEVER that great an OS and wasn't even halfway decent until SP2, I would argue both Win2K and XP X64 AKA 2K3 Workstation 64 were better OSes) when I bet a good 90% of the hardware they have running would take both Windows 7 AND Windows 10 without requiring new hardware and with Windows 7 able to be upgraded to Windows 10 while keeping your programs and settings via WU? Its really a no brainer, they could run Win 7 now and once IT has checked all their mission critical stuff runs fine on Windows 10 just push out the upgrade. Hell Win 7 has XP Mode so they can't even use application compatibility as an excuse,so its sad and shameful all their citizens info is gonna be at risk just because they couldn't get off their butts even with nearly a half a decade of warning what was coming!