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NHS and Windows XP
lala
Posts: 21,175 Forum Member
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With Windows XP, effectively coming to an end in April- Microsoft producing their last patch for the 13 year old system- I am just wondering where this will leave the NHS?
As I am currently working within the NHS, and almost all of our servers in my surgery is run on XP, or has XP as its foundation. I have not heard anything from the admin department in regards to an update to our system... In fact the practice manager knows nothing about it. Apparently she did not even know our computers were XP, she thought, quote, "they were the latest version". And you wonder why the NHS loses money with people like that in charge :rolleyes:
. To be fair she's great in other areas.
So what is going to happen, because surely our information on their servers will be vulnerable to hacking once Microsoft effectively pulls the plug?
The NHS should have updated their surgery systems to at least Windows 7 ages ago. It is a 13 year old system, so one really can't blame microsoft for calling it quits.
As I am currently working within the NHS, and almost all of our servers in my surgery is run on XP, or has XP as its foundation. I have not heard anything from the admin department in regards to an update to our system... In fact the practice manager knows nothing about it. Apparently she did not even know our computers were XP, she thought, quote, "they were the latest version". And you wonder why the NHS loses money with people like that in charge :rolleyes:
. To be fair she's great in other areas.So what is going to happen, because surely our information on their servers will be vulnerable to hacking once Microsoft effectively pulls the plug?
The NHS should have updated their surgery systems to at least Windows 7 ages ago. It is a 13 year old system, so one really can't blame microsoft for calling it quits.
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With regards to the client side of things, I still think XP was one of the best MS operating systems so unless there's a real need to update to W7 or W8, maybe they'd be better off investing in other areas first?
Go sit on the bottom step and think about what you've just said.
Windows 8 does the exact same thing as Windows XP!
So is Windows 2000 still being supported then?
However any large organisation or company has the option to pay MS for extended support which goes on well past the public support cut off date.
So even if the NHS doesn't move away from XP before the cut off they could potentially still receive updates as an extended support customer.
Of course ideally they'd have moved away from XP already, but realistically with something as big and complex as the sort of the systems the NHS have to deal with any such move is usually very expensive, and potentially complex.
For example the NHS from memory uses a bunch of expensive and often custom software for certain things, so if they moved to Windows 7, they would need to make sure that both their hardware could cope ok (unlikely with a lot of the older machines), and more importantly all the software they're running can also cope with it.
It can be an interesting job to get common hardware that was fine with XP to run on Vista/7/8 due to driver support not being available, so I can imagine what might happen with some of the stuff the NHS uses that might use custom interfaces
Except, perhaps, run that one crucial bit of software that your business/organisation/surgery depends on.
windows 8 is terrible if you are familiar with xp although apparently new updates will make it more like previous
No, Windows 2000 support ended in July 2010 IIRC. Was a great OS in its day but it's a bit dated now. It was XP without all the crap and fluff. Only problem with 2000 is that it took forever to boot up. It was certainly better than Windows ME, which was about as stable as Britney Spears in Vegas (yes I'm a fan of Ms Spears but I've been dying to use that phrase all day
Not sure if you were being ironic so i'll bite. If they do haphazardly upgrade and lose all the information it will be a significantly bigger problem than what they have now.
ಠ_ಠ
Yeah that sounds like a good idea
Yes apparently they were negotiating a contract for extended support earlier this year:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/12/nhs_microsoft_win_xp_extended_support/
Either way, the real cost is the man hours required in actioning the work. By which I mean the planning, scheduling, localised backups, builds, reconfiguring peripherals, ironing out any teething problems afterwards, not to mention the ongoing training requirements and surge of service desk calls. All whilst someone is still keeping the day-to-day IT issues under control.
The other significant cost is getting specialist applications re-written to work on other platforms. Not sure if its still the case but some of the software was only certified up to IE7 (which isn't available in Windows7). Again there are workarounds which could theoretically bodge it but if the supplier wont help you in the event of problems its no good.
XP may well be old and soon unsupported but what they cannot afford to do is leave departments in a state where the staff are unable to do their job.
Well well well...
I hear he's been hacked, the current demand is $300 and a bag of chips.
And here we are.....this is why we are in this mess in the first place!
By 'work' I mean the ability to log on successfully and input data, access e-mails/NHS intranet.