Published in News

US coppers curse Microsoft

by on28 February 2014



Arrested development calls for XP

US coppers in one police department are cursing Microsoft for pulling the plug on Windows XP.

Conway Police Department is one of several in the US who have refused to upgrade their computers for nearly a century and have been hanging on to XP for dear life. Now they are going to face a huge upgrade bill, at least for a small police department -- $132,000.

According to the local papers, most of the cash will be spent on upgrading the hardware. The only reason the cops are changing is that federal laws insist that they should not be vulnerable to virus and hackers. What seems to be happening is the local city IT Director Lloyd Hartzell is insisting that, as many XP machines be kept as possible. 

His argument is that the cops do not need to be connected to the Internet anyway and so he is only upgrading those machines which need a web connection. This is partly because the city’s budget for this fiscal year does not include any money for new capital improvements, like computer updates. The only way it can afford upgrades is by using the money the cops collect from drug arrests.

What this seems to highlight is the dire state of police funding in the US.

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