Preparing to die

Does your computer use Windows XP? What are you going to do next week when Windows XP goes dead? Sean Gallagher writes,

On Wednesday, ComputerWeekly reported that the UK government agreed to pay Microsoft £5.548 million (approximately $9.1 million) for continued support of Windows XP, Office 2003, and Exchange 2003 for all British public sector customers. On Friday, the Dutch government cut its own “multi-million Euro” deal with Microsoft for custom XP support of over 30,000 computers still running the Windows XP operating system.

Those deals may be just a drop in the bucket in comparison to what the US government may have to pay for support of the hundreds of thousands of systems still running Windows XP and other end-of-life software. Despite years of foreknowledge of the end of support for the operating system, there are still a large number of systems running Windows XP within government, including computers on sensitive networks and embedded systems. Many hospitals in the US still use Windows XP on workstations and healthcare devices because software developers have not had their products certified by regulators for use with later versions of Windows.

Will Microsoft get a blackmail payment from the US government? Thanks to Instapundit for linking to Gallagher's article.