London's Metropolitan Police Still Running 27,000 Windows XP Desktops (thestack.com)

An anonymous reader writes: London's Met Police has missed its deadline for abandoning the out-of-date operating system Windows XP, as findings reveal 27,000 computers still run on the software two years after official support ended. Microsoft stopped issuing updates and patches for Windows XP in Spring 2014, meaning that any new bugs and flaws in the operating system are left open to attack. A particularly risky status for the UK capital's police force – itself running operations against hacking and other cybercrime activity. The figures were disclosed by Conservative politician Andrew Boff. The Greater London Assembly member said: 'The Met should have stopped using Windows XP in 2014 when extended support ended, and to hear that 27,000 computers are still using it is worrying.' As in similar cases across civil departments, the core problem is bespoke system development, and the costs and time associated with integrating a new OS with customized systems.

Comments

It's not as simple as "just switch over"

[ZeroPly]

As someone who is on the tail end of a 700 computer migration from WinXP to Win7, I feel their pain. A single critical program that won't run on Win7 can be a showstopper. Not to mention special hardware for which no Win7 drivers are available - all of a sudden that $120 upgrade cost for a Win7 license became $25,120 when you include the cost of a new laser engraver.

Re:It's not as simple as "just switch over"

[BarbaraHudson]

[[and they can always leave a few isolated XP boxes up to support laser engravers and the like.]]

Not if they have software or hardware has to have a network connection for 3rd party licensing purposes. .

That's the future for Windows 10. Your network goes down, you don't just lose your "cloud", but the ability to do pretty much anything. They'll make sure they keep a local cache of the start menu ads, "for your convenience during the interruption of service."

Re:It's not as simple as "just switch over"

[boristdog]

I still have to support NT4, XP, VxWorks, Win98 and even some networked DOS machines in our factory.

You don't go changing the OS on a piece of equipment that costs over a million bucks to replace and all the software for the equipment is written for that OS. You just keep supporting it. And when you have hundreds of machines that cost a shit-ton of money to replace but work fine with the old OS, you keep supporting it.

And you call the new employees a buncha goddamn whiners because they don't want to learn "old stuff."

Knowing old stuff makes you valuable.

Run them for another ten years

[iamacat]

As long as firewall is on and you run a fixed set of apps from trusted sources, you are perfectly safe. So is IE if you only visit internal sites. And for external browsing, browser security is more important than OS security. There will be forked versions of recent Firefox and Chromium builds forever.

The whole upgrade hype is largely financially motivated on part of Microsoft and consulting agencies.

Re:Lots of citites still run windows

[__aaclcg7560]

Trying to run a government or even a moderately complex business with Linux machines would be the mother of all clusterfucks.

You're obviously not familiar with the patching process for Microsoft Windows. I give my thanks to Microsoft everyday for the job security it provides me.

Re:Simple solution

[MitchDev]

Doesn't matter, when a company stops supporting a product, they should lose the copyright over it and it should become public domain.