Thousands of PCs will be migrated to Windows 7

Oct 22, 2015 11:29 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft ended support for Windows XP nearly one year and a half ago, but this doesn't necessarily mean that everyone has already moved to a newer version of Windows.

The best example comes from the United Kingdom, where several charities and organizations are still on Windows XP and, what's worse, are now completely unprotected after the local government ended the extended support deal with Microsoft.

British charity Oxfam, which currently groups organizations in 94 countries worldwide to fight poverty, is still on Windows XP, but their officials claim they now have to pay for the upgrades to Windows 7 on their own because the government ended the deal with Microsoft.

In 2014, the British government purchased extended support from the Redmond-based software giant for one more year, thus making sure the computers belonging to ministries, state departments, schools, and charities would continue to receive updates until they complete the switch to a newer OS version.

UK government terminated the extended support deal

The deal expired in April 2015, so computers that are still on Windows XP no longer receive updates. Oxfam, which still has thousands of devices running Windows XP, claims that the government left them without any other option than to pay for their own updates, and that's exactly what they are doing right now.

“We were running under the government contract, although the government this year pulled out so that left us exposed,” Oxfam CIO Peter Ransom told V3. “Microsoft was flexible about how we’d pay and gave us some phasing options, but ultimately we had to pay for support,” he said.

Surprisingly, their operating system of choice is not Windows 8.1 or Windows 10, but Windows 8.1, which, according to their CIO's statement, is the better option, given the fact that a switch to Windows 10 is possible at a later time.

“Once we put [Windows] 7 in we’ll have all the infrastructure to do a [Windows] 10 upgrade quite simply,” Ransom continued.

At this point, there are approximately 10 percent of the desktops out there that are still running Windows XP, but numbers are rapidly dropping because of the arrival of Windows 10.