MS extends XP antimalware support to next year.

Shocking article from the beeb.

A company that we deal with is also stuck on XP and in particular IE 7 because their bespoke warehouse system doesn't work in any other browser.

There are few W7 machines in there but if they want to use the warehouse software they have to boot into virtual XP.

Last year they turned over £202m and have an 18 strong IT dept with 5 dev's, sometimes the mind boggles. :confused:
 
Columbo said:
Last year they turned over £202m and have an 18 strong IT dept with 5 dev's, sometimes the mind boggles. :confused:
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Lack of someone willing to put there head above the parapet and force through change? Its all to easy to become compliant in larger company's.
You see it all the time, IT dept's with not enough backing/authority to really make the changes needed.

Hopefully with MS's view on shorter release schedules should keep most IT depts on there toes!
 
If you're a data controller (and lets face it who isn't these days) the threat of a fine and prosecution should be enough motivation.
 
LizardKing said:
Lack of someone willing to put there head above the parapet and force through change? Its all to easy to become compliant in larger company's.
You see it all the time, IT dept's with not enough backing/authority to really make the changes needed.
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Talking to the head of IT, it's more of the chief exec not understanding IT and therefore having no interest in it.

He's of the old school 'if it aint broke, don't fix it' approach apparently, which is fine until one of the security holes thats wide open because it's not been fixed causes the business to stop.
 
The problem is the "I told you so" approach doesn't really work in the real world. If the **** starts flying it will land on IT regardless.
 
We've got hundreds that need to be upgraded/replaced before April, about 20% of the estate. Fingers crossed we're on target.

We're fortunate that management have been fully behind it (and the hardware refresh where necessary), plus we're on an EA so there's no software costs. Even given 18 months notice there are still some departments that are procrastinating on it and gambling that IT will back down. They'll just find all the XP machines have their computer accounts disabled on deadline day, and the network ports disabled shortly after that.
 
Some people still running on XP are doing it on XP-era hardware. Which is pretty amazing because I didn't realise there were companies out there that hated their staff that much.

"Oh yes we saved money by having our staff constantly annoyed at the performance of their PCs instead of spending £400 and allowing them to work much faster" - a thing said by nobody ever.
 
I've been there 9 years, and some departments are using Pentium 4s purchased before I started... :eek:

User : "I want a new machine, it takes 10 minutes to start up."
Me : "Give me a budget code, you can have a new one in 2 weeks."
User : "We don't have the money."
Me : "Not my problem, we're IT not a charity."
 
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Were still running xp and no signs of moving forward.
Same as above the desktops are ancient but no "budget", despite several new paper articles slamming us for money in a bank. The laptops are better and at least boot in a reasonable time.

Makes no sense at all. The it needs a massive overhaul.
Such a waste of money, I really do think some CEOs or high up managers are branded. How many wasted man hours due to IT which they're paying for anyway.

We need 10s of thousands of new computers.
 
Columbo said:
Shocking article from the beeb.

A company that we deal with is also stuck on XP and in particular IE 7 because their bespoke warehouse system doesn't work in any other browser.

There are few W7 machines in there but if they want to use the warehouse software they have to boot into virtual XP.

Last year they turned over £202m and have an 18 strong IT dept with 5 dev's, sometimes the mind boggles. :confused:
Click to expand...

Unless they've upgraded in the past 12 months since I left, Sainsbury's still uses XP for almost all of their systems, along with IE6 (for their browser-based inventory management and admin systems) and various other outdated versions of software e.g. Adobe Reader etc. The tills all run Windows 2000 except the NCR self-checkouts which are also XP.
 
Its quite amazing, the millennium bug had thousands spent on contingency's ect yet something that is quite real gets left on the back burner!

Caged said:
"Oh yes we saved money by having our staff constantly annoyed at the performance of their PCs instead of spending £400 and allowing them to work much faster" - a thing said by nobody ever.
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I used this argument in an effort to get new hardware and it worked. Fag packet maths puts productivity down by a conservative hour a week, spread that over X amount of employees for the next 3 years then a new pc becomes staggeringly cheap!

I've also seen a drastic reduction in support calls with 7, almost to the point when i'm on site i have very little to do!
 
TheVoice said:
Unless they've upgraded in the past 12 months since I left, Sainsbury's still uses XP for almost all of their systems, along with IE6 (for their browser-based inventory management and admin systems) and various other outdated versions of software e.g. Adobe Reader etc. The tills all run Windows 2000 except the NCR self-checkouts which are also XP.
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They're on basically the same software/ hardware combo us us (Beetle's running Retalix), so I'd expect all standard tills to be on a very similar rolling replacement program to low-end Core2's running XP embedded.

Up until pretty recently we were using a remote desktop connection of some sort into a Windows 3.11 box to pickup store emails. We're still using AmiPro for standard word-processing ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amí - Windows 3.11 era 16-bit software) for that matter :eek:

If you want to pickup the multi-billion pound bill for implementing the next version of Windows in a large corporation, please go ahead! The staff would love to get rid of the outdated rubbish, but that's not happening.

-Leezer-
 
If you're using programs designed for Windows XP on a Windows XP spec'd machine. Then how does it just all of a sudden become useless just because it is old.

Surely it would only become useless if you started using more up to date software and programs on the XP spec'd machine.

A shop using EPOS with XP on 10 years ago will still be capable of running XP now if the rest of the EPOS system hasn't changed.
 
XP will become a liability as soon as one bit of new malware gets onto the network to which the XP machine is connected. MS won't be patching vunerabilities after April the 8th.

XP Embedded machines such as EPOS tills and thin clients get a further 2 year reprieve IIRC, but it'll be likely be down to the hardware manufacturer to package up and supply updates.
 
Your missing a little point here.

Although the products are now out of extended mainstream support, large companies and especially the banks pay an awful lot of money to MS to continue the support of their systems, which will include software fixes and patches for any issues discovered. They just wont get released to the general population
 
LeeUK said:
If you're using programs designed for Windows XP on a Windows XP spec'd machine. Then how does it just all of a sudden become useless just because it is old.

Surely it would only become useless if you started using more up to date software and programs on the XP spec'd machine.

A shop using EPOS with XP on 10 years ago will still be capable of running XP now if the rest of the EPOS system hasn't changed.
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But that's the thing, they do change. New features are added, things are changed, the interfaces are updated etc and they start to struggle more and more.
 
DustyMiller said:
Your missing a little point here.

Although the products are now out of extended mainstream support, large companies and especially the banks pay an awful lot of money to MS to continue the support of their systems, which will include software fixes and patches for any issues discovered. They just wont get released to the general population
Click to expand...

That's a business decision for them to make, I'm looking at it from the IT perpective. Once the cost of support and the security risks outweigh the cost of a kit refresh you can bet the bean counters will get involved.
 
TheVoice said:
But that's the thing, they do change. New features are added, things are changed, the interfaces are updated etc and they start to struggle more and more.
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The tills at my previous place of work were running XP (and still are) with 256mb of RAM. They have been for around a decade or so. They still work fine, so what's the incentive to upgrade them, just because MS have newer products? Yes they have had the odd tweak and feature change, but they still work fine, most of the time.

Basically I can see LeeUK's point, even if you can't.
 
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