Microsoft Windows XP was released fifteen years ago and still powers a staggering amount of the world’s PCs

Microsoft’s popular Windows XP operating system is very popular this weekend. It is the third most used system  fifteen years after it was released. But that’s not the reason it made headlines. The operating system was exploited by the WannaCry ransomware. Microsoft has released five successive operating systems in the following years. Clearly it has a vested interest in pushing customers into upgrading to the latest system.

Despite Microsoft’s decision to stop issuing security updates in april 2014, security experts found that many systems are still using XP. But not all organisations are running the latest software.

In fact, it turns out that Windows XP is still the third most popular operating system in the world. Windows XP is still running on 7.04% of the world’s computers. And it’s still more widely used than Windows 8.1 (released in 2013) or any version of Apple’s Mac OSX or the open-source Linux OS.

Following the weekend’s ransomware attack, Microsoft took the unusual step of issuing a security patch for Windows XP. It accompanied this with a blog post urging people to upgrade to the latest version.

Source: www.mirror.co.uk/tech