14 DAY TRIAL // Windows XP will be retired in approximately 10 days, but plenty of users across the world are still running it, including computers belonging to the Indian government.
As you could have guessed, the local authorities are taking the necessary steps to make sure that their data is secure and are now asking government bodies to upgrade by March 31 to a newer and safer operating system.
Surprisingly, however, the National Informatics Center (NIC) doesn’t want local computers to be upgraded to Windows by all means, but to a newer OS version, such as Windows 7 or Linux.
“Government departments have been told to switch to other operating systems like Windows 7 or to open source operating systems like Linux,” people close to the talks have been quoted as saying by India Today.
“Applications on government websites and platforms running on Windows XP will continue to function smoothly. But there will be problems if, for example, any new application is added to the website.”
Windows XP support will come to an end on April 8, so after this date, all computers still running this OS version could become vulnerable to attacks if an unpatched vulnerable is detected. Experts across the world and Microsoft warned that users will be exposed to a wide array of risks, starting with malware infections and ending with exploits supposed to take advantage of security flaws.
Windows XP, however, remains a very popular operating system that’s still powering 29 percent of the desktop computers worldwide, so Microsoft has turned to all kinds of tactics to push users to another operating system.
Starting March 8, Windows XP machines are displaying upgrade notifications telling people to switch to Windows 8.1 before April 8, while Security Essentials, the freeware anti-virus offered to Windows users, is showing warnings that computers could remain unprotected in 10 days.
Security Essentials will stop supporting Windows XP on April 8 as well, but the existing installation will keep working and receive virus definitions for at least one more year. Still, download links for XP versions will be removed, so users won’t be able to install the app on their computers.
Plenty of security vendors out there, on the other hand, have already confirmed that extended support for Windows XP will continue to be provided, which means that users will still have plenty of apps to choose from to keep their computers protected.