IRS misses XP deadline, pays Microsoft millions for patches

  • 12 April 2014
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Tax collector has 58,000 PCs still running the aged XP; will spend $30M to upgrade to Windows 7

The U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) acknowledged this week that it missed the April 8 cut-off for Windows XP support, and will be paying Microsoft millions for an extra year of security patches.

Microsoft terminated Windows XP support on Tuesday when it shipped the final public patches for the nearly-13-year-old operating system. Without patches for vulnerabilities discovered in the future, XP systems will be at risk from cyber criminals who hijack the machines and plant malware on them.

During an IRS budget hearing Monday before the House Financial Services and General Government subcommittee, the chairman, Rep. Ander Crenshaw (R-Fla.) wondered why the agency had not wrapped up its Windows XP-to-Windows 7 move.

"Now we find out that you've been struggling to come up with $30 million to finish migrating to Windows 7, even though Microsoft announced in 2008 that it would stop supporting Windows XP past 2014," Crenshaw said at the hearing. "I know you probably wish you'd already done that."
 
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Thanks Jeff I wonder why Windows 7 and not Windows 8.1?
 
Daniel
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That question did occur to me as well and the only thing I can think of is that W8 was not overly popular at all and maybe they did not think it had a long shelf life. I think the latest update has improved things a lot though but it is too late for them now.
Userlevel 7
My own employer has been changing the workstations off WIndows XP over the last couple of months.  They are switching to... Windows 7.  No Windows 8 for us. 
 
I do not know all of the reasons, but among them are compatibility, stability, 

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