14 DAY TRIAL //
Windows XP no longer receives support since April 2014, but the world is giving up on this old operating system at a painfully slow pace, and the Met Police knows it best.
A new report reveals that the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) is still running Windows XP on some 19,5000 computers, as the upgrade to Windows 8.1 is not yet complete across the entire organization.
And yes, you’ve read it right, the Met Police is only upgrading to Windows 8.1 and not to Windows 10, as you’d normally expect, with approximately 15,500 systems already upgraded to the operating system launched in 2013.
But while you might be tempted to believe that the Met Police running Windows XP on so many systems is bad news, it’s not, because this is actually an improvement from 27,000 computers that were powered by the 15-year-old operating system last August, according to V3.
Hardware upgrades also planned
So why is it taking so long, you could ask? It’s all because the Met Police has legacy apps that might suffer from compatibility issues when upgrading to newer versions of Windows.
“The upgrade programme is not as simple as it would be for many other organisation due to the amount of specialist legacy software upon which, parts of the MPS still rely,” a Met Police spokesperson was quoted as saying. “Replacements or remediation for this software, which are compatible with a more modern operating system, have to be ready before the roll-out is completed to ensure continued operational effectiveness.”
But why not Windows 10, you could also ask. It’s because some computers need hardware upgrades, the Met Police says, and they are already planned, only that things take place gradually and no target deadline is available just yet.
In the meantime, the Police keeps paying millions of pounds to Microsoft for custom support, as Microsoft keeps providing patches and security fixes for Windows XP according to a deal that expires in April 2017. It’s not yet clear if authorities plan to extend this deal, but this shouldn’t be the case if the upgrade program is completed.