George W Bush was president of the United States, the first self-contained artificial heart was put into a human and Microsoft released XP. That was 13 years ago. Today Windows XP should be a distant memory. The last significant update to it was seven years ago and Microsoft has moved the product to "end of life" now, which means it no longer gets even basic bug and security patches.

That hasn't stopped the British Government, NHS and Met Police from keeping the OS on some of its systems though - and that's becoming a big problem. Aside from the security problems, there is a cost involved in obtaining support from Microsoft, and it's substantial. The government PCs, for example, cost 5.5 million to cover under Microsoft's bespoke support deal. While that means the machines get critical security fixes, they are still running with code that was retired a long time ago and are inherently less secure than modern systems.

According to Motherboard, there are 35,000 machines in the Met running XP. And The Inquirer says that Microsoft is charging $600 per licence for Server 2003 machines to get extended support. Even at half that, XP will cost the police a staggering amount of money to continue support for.

Microsoft will be charging even more for the next year, and this will never end until the machines are upgraded, or the institution running them decides to stop paying for extra support.To get this extended life you must negotiate directly with Microsoft, and the firm has no interest in making this cheap. After all, it wants people off XP as soon as possible, and with good reason because it is way past its best now.

The problem, apparently, exists because the machines sit across various departments. No department at the Met, NHS or Government will take responsibility for all of them for their organisation, so they just sit there running an ancient OS. In the meantime money that should be spent on much better things, like healthcare and policing is being squandered.

Of course, to get these PCs running newer operating systems might require upgrades or replacement machines, but we can't keep paying money to Microsoft to support this ancient OS, it's an atrocious waste of money in times of alleged austerity. Between the computers of the NHS, Government and Met Police we're throwing away tens of millions per year on something that should have been sorted out a long time ago.

It's time to fix this problem before it gets worse.

Source: Motherboard, The Inquirer