Microsoft has announced that it is to reverse its decision to prematurely end support for Windows 7 and 8.1 for devices running Intel Skylake chips.
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Microsoft now has fully gone back on that initial plan by offering full support until the operating systems’ end of life – January 14 2020 for Windows 7 and January 10 2023 for Windows 8.1.
The Met arrived at this number after upgrading 8000 computers to Windows 8.1, slashing the number of XP reliant computers from 35,000 a year ago to 27,000.
The report claims the Met now is paying £1.65 million of taxpayer’s money for an extended support agreement with Microsoft unti April 2017.
According to the Microsoft Blog, the Skylake Processor run Windows 7/8.1 PC/laptops will continue to receive support and security updates upto 2018.
Now, however, Microsoft’s director of Windows business planning Shad Larsen said the company had changed its mind again as a result of protests by enterprise customers. One thing hasn’t changed: Future “silicon platforms” including Intel’s upcoming 7th generation Intel Core (“Kabylake”) processor family and AMD’s upcoming 7th generation processor family (“Bristol Ridge”) will only be supported on Windows 10. Windows 10 version 1607 LTSB is actually getting released on October 1, but it’s listed in the policy nonetheless. Meanwhile, the company is facing two lawsuits over its efforts to get customers to replace previous Windows versions with Windows 10.
A member of the London Assembly has asked why the Metropolitan Police is still running Windows XP on thousand of its computers. After that date, the company and its computer-making partners would not guarantee that they would revise device drivers to support Windows 7 and 8.1 on newer hardware. This gave about 18 months for businesses with Skylake-equipped devices to upgrade to Windows 10.
To support these customers, Microsoft is extending its support date to the end of support dates for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1.
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“The Met should have stopped using Windows XP in 2014 when extended support ended, and to hear that 27,000 computers are still using it is worrying”, Boff said. The question is harder than it seems: 27,000 of its computers run Windows XP, an OS not now supported by Microsoft. Don’t worry, though – in eight years die-hard Windows 10 users will be complaining about not wanting Windows 12.
