Not dead yet: Dutch, British governments pay to keep Windows XP alive

Not dead yet: Dutch, British governments pay to keep Windows XP alive... Governments pay Microsoft millions to continue support for “end of life” OS.

by Sean Gallagher - Apr 6 2014, 7:00 am EDT

Windows XP is supposed to be dead next week. But the Dutch and British governments have both inked deals with Microsoft to continue to keep it on life support, at least for them—under Microsoft’s Custom Support program.

On Wednesday, ComputerWeekly reported that the UK government agreed to pay Microsoft £5.548 million (approximately $9.1 million) for continued support of Windows XP, Office 2003, and Exchange 2003 for all British public sector customers. On Friday, the Dutch government cut its own “multi-million Euro” deal with Microsoft for custom XP support of over 30,000 computers still running the Windows XP operating system.

Those deals may be just a drop in the bucket in comparison to what the US government may have to pay for support of the hundreds of thousands of systems still running Windows XP and other end-of-life software. Despite years of foreknowledge of the end of support for the operating system, there are still a large number of systems running Windows XP within government, including computers on sensitive networks and embedded systems. Many hospitals in the US still use Windows XP on workstations and healthcare devices because software developers have not had their products certified by regulators for use with later versions of Windows.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/not-dead-yet-dutch-british-governments-pay-to-keep-windows-xp-alive/

That is totally understandable seeing as even in America, so many businesses and even doctors, hospitals, and other healthcare professions still use Windows XP.

As I've discussed with Rich, I use several older Toshiba laptops in my work as a performing musician, two of which, including the one I use on my gigs, still run XP.  I've had great luck with them over time, and have worked at keeping them running for the applications I need in my work.  

     Knowing that this day was coming, and also knowing that laptops have a limited lifespan, I've been fortunate in adapting the older software I use for MIDI sequencing, playing backing tracks behind my voice and guitar, to my newer machines that run Windows 7.  Luckily, Windows 7 has protocols written into it that facilitate running older software, and even with my limited computer skills, I got my Cakewalk sequencing software to run on my newer machine.  Now I know I have backup if my work laptop goes down, as I know it will one day...

I can understand why they're doing so. XP was a damned good OS, nice and stable. As Mu_Shin stated above, I also found Win7 to be a nice, stable OS - albeit quite a bit more of a resource hog than XP.

Having said that, at least Win7 was a true 64 bit OS, enabling it to make use of the extended resources becoming available on higher end (at the time) computers. I talked to a few people that were running XP 64 bit, and results were generally not good.

As for Win8? I've decided to forgo it. Even with 8.1 returning to us our much loved start menu and taskbar, I can't see essentially beta testing an OS that has been a resounding FLOP for Microsoft. Not to mention, I'm running an older computer, and I might not have the resources to run Win8 well. In the end, I'll stick with Win7 because it runs well and is stable on my computer, and I don't feel a need to upgrade just because an upgrade is available, and give Microsoft more of my hard-earned $$ for an OS nobody seems to like.

Damn Microsoft and their "planned obsolescence!"

You hit the nail right on the head... "planned obsolescence."