installing windows xp

[carnageX]

To be honest, your situation is unique. As long as your computers don't need to be online to get this data from the trains, fine. For most companies, however, these machines are online and thus pose a major security risk. The security risk should to outweigh the cost of an upgrade every time.

As for a company going out of business, if the company can't afford to keep their software up to date, then they're already on the way out of business IMO. It's the cost of doing business in the first place. If you can't keep up, then you're not doing well. It's only bringing the inevitable to fruition a bit faster.

I can argue against that somewhat as I have experience with similar situation... Working at a place that did manufacturing of electronic components / metal fabrication, the systems those devices ran on were extremely old in terms of OS. There was a machine that ran on DOS 6.2 (in German), some machines that ran OS2-Warp, and several other systems that ran a stripped-down XP.

Those machines cost hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars...and the manufacturer of such machines won't just give a software upgrade. They'll force you to replace the entire machine. The machines themselves worked fine...so there was no reason to replace them just for an upgraded OS. The systems were on the internal network, however they were split off on a separate VLAN so they weren't open/susceptible to internet attacks. So sometimes it's not a case of "just upgrade it" because the machinery can't interface with newer software without the machinery itself being upgraded as well.

 

[MidnightShadow]

To be honest, your situation is unique. As long as your computers don't need to be online to get this data from the trains, fine. For most companies, however, these machines are online and thus pose a major security risk. The security risk should to outweigh the cost of an upgrade every time.

@Carnage, that's why I said what I did. If you're not vulnerable to the Internet, it's a different story. It's just the companies that use them online and have data that, if stolen/compromised, would cause the company to fold due to lawsuits and whatnot.

 

[Frosty is a Snowman]

The XP machines go on our network, and have internet access.
They are a major security risk.
We are aware of this and can do nothing about it.

The rail industry used to be owned by the government, and is now a private franchise industry, so it becomes complicated, especially when finding funding to upgrade systems, or getting someone to sign the cheques.

The rail industry in the UK(and other countries) still has a lot of old tech, such as some trains running on Win98 lol.
But they are not on any networks and are standalone, so pose no security risk.
We still do terminal emulation, as some systems have not been upgrade since the late 80's and early 90's

We are not alone, a number of industries are out of date, and fail audits all the time.