NSW Govt spends half a million dollars on XP support

The government in the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW) has spent more than half a million dollars to allow eight state agencies to persist with Windows XP. Extended support for the operating system famously ended in April this year, four and a half years after the release of Windows 7, the Windows release often …

[Khaptain]

"The arrangement covers ServiceFirst, NSW Health, NSW Fire and Rescue, [NSW] Police, Transport for NSW, Department of Trade and Investment, Department of Family and Community Services, Endeavour Energy and Energy Australia,"

XP = 12 years old ( ok with patches and SPs its not quite that old but you get the point)

Does this mean that they have probably not done an IT refresh for about 5 years.. It would be interesting to throw a bad tempered security auditor in amongst that lot and see what interesting results he could come up with.

Brings on the image of grubby Mike Hammer kind of guys bashing away at outdated PCs, losing the rag and throwing the old beige monitors out of the 4th story windows, Sin city style.

[david 12]

Windows NT = 21 years old (ok with patches and SPs its not quite that old but you get the point)

... no, what exactly is the point?

[Martyn 1]

NSW != NSFW

Am I the only one who misread the headline and came here looking for some sleaze?

Dissapointed

(Paris to make up for the missing titillation)

[Winkypop]

NSW

Non Secure Windows

[TimChuma]

Custom apps?

More than likely custom software that requires XP to run. Lotus Notes is still being used in some state government departments in Australia even though they can't get anyone to support it.

[Trixr]

Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha.

They certainly aren't the only govvie-type agency in the same boat. Looks like we'll be shelling out till 2015.

As for "custom apps", no not really. No Lotus, in-house apps that could be replatformed (given sufficient money and devs - still cheaper than XP support), and a couple of obsolete 3rd party apps that could have been replaced with other 3rd party apps years ago. With better functionality.

[Anonymous Coward]

TfNSW

Now, speaking as (for obvious reasons anon.) an operator in the transport industry, I am hardly surprised. I mean, they burned so much money on the failed TCard system, then had to buy Opal and so on - I guess they could not afford to upgrade to Win7