2020-01-27 4:00
Technology
Alex Lowe

German government is still using Windows 7, now has to pay Microsoft for extended support

German government is still using Windows 7, now has to pay Microsoft for extended support

Microsoft dropped support for Windows 7 earlier this month on January 14th, and it may a pain for consumers to upgrade, even though users should have upgraded during the time Microsoft was making the upgrade free of charge to Windows 10. It is a lot more time consuming for enterprise environments to handle the upgrades to a new operating system.

Microsoft dropped the news that Windows 7 would become end of life soon, back in September 2018 and gave us the exact date in December last year. But despite the warnings and time given to upgrade, the German government has failed to upgrade from Windows 7 in time and it now has 33,000 machines running the unsupported operating system.

According to Handelsblatt, a German newspaper the German Federal Ministry has around 33,000 computers running Windows 7. The cost to get extended support and security updates from Microsoft is about $887,000.

It is perfectly normal for Microsoft to offer extended support to companies that need an older operating system. Windows XP was in use for years after the consumer version had been dropped and according to ZDNet, Microsoft is charging $50 per computer for one year extra of extended support. For every year it lapses, the charge will go up.

Why the German government hasn’t upgraded their computers sooner is unknown, and likely that cost has come out of taxpayers money.

Source: Handelsblatt

Alex Lowe

German government is still using Windows 7, now has to pay Microsoft for extended support

Alex Lowe is the owner and editor of the interface and started the website in 2013. He publishes the majority of the content on the website, hosts the three podcasts and the runs the YouTube channels. Alex has a professional background in computer networking, FWA and WiFi.

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