News - Windows XP antimalware support extended for a further 15 months

[HEXUS]

Microsoft will stop providing all other support for XP and Office 2003 as of 8th April.

Read more.

[rAt3100]

china 50 percent? hard to believe

[hackguy]

china 50 percent? hard to believe

Why? China is not US/Europe, you know.

[wasabi]

Cool. Extended lease of life for the old netbook.

[ionicle]

microsoft should really just revamp XP, call it XP 2014, and fix it from the ground up, almost reprogram it, give it the latest IE and WMP etc but keep the basic way it operates, and start selling it again, perhaps offer it as a free upgrade to current XP users, and split the current windows line into windows 8.1 and XP 14

[gman1981]

Microsoft will still not be supplying patches and security updates to the OS itself, just to the anti-virus and anti-malware products such as ForeFront and MSE. The underlying OS will be vulnerable!

[wasabi]

With the Zune theme it still looks quite good too.

[miniyazz]

Before Microsoft’s announcement of the deadline extension, there were worries of an "April hacker storm" on thousands of PCs at Britain's biggest public sector bodies, according to The Register. The report underlined that HMRC and the NHS still runs thousands of systems using Windows XP.

These government organisations have expressed worries that their migration plans to a newer OS were not going to be completed by the April 2014 deadline. Estimated completion dates to move from XP are; the end of 2014 for HMRC, Q3 2014 for NHS Scotland and Q3 2014 for NHS England.

Maybe if they'd got off their collective bums at some point in the last 6 years (yes, that's how long ago Microsoft announced support for XP was going to end in April 2014!) they wouldn't be in their current predicament.
Seriously, I have no sympathy for them whatsoever, more anger at yet another example of public money being spent on incompetence.

[jackvdbuk]

microsoft should really just revamp XP, call it XP 2014, and fix it from the ground up, almost reprogram it, give it the latest IE and WMP etc but keep the basic way it operates, and start selling it again, perhaps offer it as a free upgrade to current XP users, and split the current windows line into windows 8.1 and XP 14

microsoft is a business, what would the justification be? and the cost involved would be huge for no profit?

[zdn1042]

Good news to those still packing XP, I guess.

[McEwin]

Maybe if they'd got off their collective bums at some point in the last 6 years (yes, that's how long ago Microsoft announced support for XP was going to end in April 2014!) they wouldn't be in their current predicament.
Seriously, I have no sympathy for them whatsoever, more anger at yet another example of public money being spent on incompetence.

And in the mean time all your financial and medical information is more vulnerable... idiots.

[TheAnimus]

And in the mean time all your financial and medical information is more vulnerable... idiots.

Normally these things have your data incredibly vulnerable, but isolated from public networks, the idea is if you've access to the system you are already 'trusted'.

I've often wondered how many things go missing at HMRC because of corruption.

[Andeh13]

Maybe if they'd got off their collective bums at some point in the last 6 years (yes, that's how long ago Microsoft announced support for XP was going to end in April 2014!) they wouldn't be in their current predicament.
Seriously, I have no sympathy for them whatsoever, more anger at yet another example of public money being spent on incompetence.

Oh lord, can you imagine what the Government gets charged for something as simple as upgrading a computer's operating system!? How much a school has to pay for a crappy laptop for the teachers!? It's honestly like your grandparents walking into PC world having been told they need to upgrade their computer to Windows 8, and to make sure they get a ''good deal''. Always with zero accountability.