14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft yesterday rolled out this month's Patch Tuesday fixes and Windows XP was left out of this rollout for the first time since its release.
The software giant says that it's very keen on keeping its promise to let Windows XP unpatched and reminded everyone still running it that it's mandatory to move to another operating system that still gets updates and security fixes as soon as possible.
“If you’re still on Windows XP, you won’t receive any security or non-security updates through Windows Update or Microsoft Update. Support ended for Windows XP April 8. If you continue to use Windows XP without support, your computer will still likely work -- but it will become vulnerable to security risks and over time, its performance will be affected,” the company explained in a post on its blog.
At the same time, the software giant noted that paying customers are still getting Windows XP fixes and security patches just because they're... well, paying. However, Microsoft emphasizes that this is only happening for a limited period of time, until they manage to upgrade all their computers to Windows 8.1.
“There are also specific cases in which some enterprise customers have custom support agreements in place directly with Microsoft. They will temporarily receive security updates for Windows XP to help bridge the gap during their migration process to a more modern operating system like Windows 8.1,” it added.
Two weeks ago, Microsoft actually broke its promise and released a fix for Windows XP, even though the company retired support for this particular OS version on April 8. The company said that this was only an exception because plenty of Windows XP users are still working to migrate their computers to Windows 8.1, so keeping them secure while doing that is a priority.
The flaw affected Internet Explorer on all Windows versions, including XP that is, and allowed an attacker to take control of a vulnerable computer once the user loaded a compromised website.
“There was one exception, with the recent release of a security update outside of the normal Update Tuesday cycle. It fixes a critical vulnerability in Internet Explorer for Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 as well as Windows XP,” the company said, adding that no other exception would ever be made.
At this point, Windows XP is still installed on nearly 26 percent of the desktop computers worldwide, but many expect more users to move to Windows 7 or 8.1 as time passes by.