UK government pays £5.5m for extended support on XP.

According to the BBC (Link) the UK government has signed a deal with Microsoft for extended support on XP.

Support for the venerable Windows XP operating system ends this Tuesday.

 

I can see more of these deals being done.
I don't think XP is going to go quietly.
I have cloned my XP SP3 Operating systems.

 

I have also heard some other business users are to get extended support but are having to pay for it.
My ex employer went firstly to Vista, then later the rest of the computers to Windows 7 so he is OK for the time being. Last time I spoke he is dreading having to move to Windows 8 and hopes by the time it is needed that they have a more business friendly system available than what Windows 8 can offer.

As for my old XP, I don't as yet have a spare IDE drive, but do have an image of it on the external drive, which as for backup will have to do for now.

 

Hmm. I remember reading the United States government was also pleading to Microsoft to extend the support for XP, however Microsoft said they couldn't. I guess money can change people's minds in an instance.

 

It has been common knowledge for a while that support was available from Microsoft for a price.

 

Oh I just see that now.

The government is still better off using that money to upgrade their OS and systems rather than sticking to XP.

 

I couldn't agree more.

 

My thoughts exactly Golden, thought I had missed something but all you are doing is paying to delay the inevitable so why not just upgrade the computers and software as they must have purchased the W7 licences?

 

I think the UK Government only want more time for the transition to another OS.
You can't train thousands of employees and change OS in five minutes.
My guess a lot of their computers will need upgrading as well if they have been running XP for years.
They are not sticking with XP indefinately.

 

Well it's going to cost Taxpayer big time now for not acting sooner.

 

Well being a UK citizen, it isn't surprising the UK government have done next to nothing till the last minute, and then hoofed out a no doubt large amount of my tax money to hopefully catch up. That is just typical of the bureaucracy here.

However, I can also see a point in paying Microsoft, as that cost will be peanuts in comparison to replacing a few million computers, as it surely will be the case for the UK government over all of the country. The same will apply for the larger companies as they also will have large numbers of machines requiring replacement.

Nev.

 

Microsoft are no doubt over the moon that they are going to rake in so much money to provide for one year, something they provided for free over the last 13 years. Rather worrying that in the future it might encourage them to start charging everyone for say a years service, by the time they get round to issuing Windows 9 or 10.

 

I often wonder why the government rather use technology from private companies when they could hire fellow countrymen to create custom systems made specially for the government and no one else. This will keep it secure and be a lot harder to 'hack'.

Such project would be 'expensive', but if the government can spend so much in defence and overthrowing other nations, why not fork out some monies to establish an agency task with this cyber project. Or perhaps assign a branch of the NSA to the project of creating privatised systems that offer more security. It will also open up more jobs for those interested in IT etc.

US is ~17trillion in debt and the guys in Washington still living the good life. A couple millions or at least billions won't hurt compare to other misuse of taxpayers monies.

 

My Nephew works as a programmer for a government contracted company writing software for the government in machine code and linux based Operating Systems. but thats all he can say without breaking contracts and secrets acts etc. so I think it's security related in ratio with cost, It would seem to me that 'sensitive' information is kept on computers with custom written operating systems and the general tax records and personal stuff of the populace is kept on commercial software.

But I think the really Bad thing is that this was known about since the launch of XP and nothing has been done, and no mention of anyone losing their Job, Microsoft have a product life support policy and you can easily find out when product support will finish for an operating system, Vista ends on 11/4/2017, Windows 7 ends on 14/1/2020 and windows 8 ends on 10/1/2023, so to me this is all down to bad planning and incompetence, reaction over proaction, hmm well that sums up government decision making really doesn't it? and I'm sure that if everyone was aware of these facts then questions would be asked, yet the news doesn't mention this, just proves what was said in a different thread about news agencies being politically aligned.

Seems to me the only winner is the shareholders of Microsoft.

 

The fact that governments do not have their own and completely enclosed hackproof systems is of course down to foreseen costs, what has been unforeseen was the level of criminal hacking activity being as high as it has become.

Sooner or later this UK, and many other governments, are going to find that the billions they did spend on super weapon defence systems are suddenly unusable due to the fact they didn't spend enough billions making sure the systems are unique and couldn't be hacked. It will be a lot worse than egg on their faces when a hacker turns a nuclear device back onto its creators. Which could be a nightmare scenario if there isn't enough done to prevent it.