Microsoft pulled the plug on Windows 7 last month and despite having given quite a long time to businesses and governments to start moving to better hardware to be able to run latest software, many are scrambling. After reports of Germany, Australia, and Ireland spending millions of taxpayer dollars to get extended support from Microsoft, it appears the National Health Service of the UK is having a tough time too.
Nearly half a million computers at the NHS are still running Windows 7. In 2018, the UK's Department of Health had given itself the target to upgrade all the devices to Windows 10 by January 2020, but it appears things didn't go as planned as a third of the department's PCs are currently running the unsupported Windows 7. This has pushed the NHS to get extended support from Microsoft.
NHS plans to upgrade all Windows 7 devices before Microsoft's support period ends
The government had signed a deal with Microsoft in April 2018 that enabled the UK's Department of Health and Social Care to upgrade all its devices to Windows 10 for free. But, that deal required that all the NHS organizations should make the upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10 by the End of Life deadline.
But, since the NHS has missed that deadline, it had to get the extended support plan. As reported last year, this extended support plan is quite expensive, costing between $25 to $50 per device per year, doubling with each passing year. Here's a quick look at how much it can cost to get extended support for Windows 7 devices for the next 3 years.
- Year 1 (January 2020 through January 2021): Windows 7 Pro is $50 per device | Windows Enterprise (add-on) $25 per device.
- Year 2 (January 2021 through January 2022): Windows 7 Pro is $100 per device | Windows Enterprise (add-on) $50 per device.
- Year 3 (January 2022 through January 2023): Windows 7 Pro is $200 per device | Windows Enterprise (add-on) $100 per device.
Folks at ZDNet report that out of the 1.37 million devices used by the NHS at least 463,784 are still running Windows 7, which means the Department is shedding tens of millions to keep all of those devices supported even for just one year.
"There is support from Microsoft for devices using Windows 7, in all NHS organisations, until 14 January 2021," the NHS Digital has said in a statement. "Migration to Windows 10 is a process which will differ depending on the specific needs of the organisation. We are working closely with the NHS to offer support to migrate to Windows 10 and are on target to complete this before the extended support period ends."
For what it's worth, the NHS has managed to update 587,531 PCs and laptops to Windows 10. A few thousand devices are also running Windows 8.
