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One of Microsoft's most hated operating systems (Windows ME is difficult to beat on that front) is destined to die in less than a month.
Windows Vista, launched to a less-than-stellar reception on January 30, 2007, saw most of its support stopped back in 2012. On April 11 this year the hammer finally falls. Microsoft warned Vista users that their systems could be compromised by an attacker in the future, especially as Security Essentials support has also now ended for the operating system.
"Windows Vista customers will no longer receive new security updates, non-security hotfixes, free or paid assisted support options, or online technical content updates from Microsoft," Redmond said.
"Microsoft has provided support for Windows Vista for the past 10 years, but the time has come for us, along with our hardware and software partners, to invest our resources towards more recent technologies so that we can continue to deliver great new experiences."
My heart does ache for our brethren, the poor, huddled Windows masses.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2017, @01:42AM (9 children)
For both people still running Windows Vista!
(Score: 1) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Monday March 20 2017, @01:50AM (8 children)
Windows 7 is a Windows Vista point release. (NT 6.1 IIRC, Vista was 6.0).
All of the bad things with respect to DRM are still in Windows 7. What happened was that vendors had time to debug their drivers, even accounting for the Protected Media Path.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2017, @02:01AM (6 children)
Great care was taken to keep backwards compatibility in Windows 7 (compared to Vista), and the number 6.1 was chosen because of apps doing version checks, and not to scare developers away. Actually a lot of the core was heavily refactored in Windows 7, tasks scheduled to fire off at the same time to reduce hard disk usage, the memory management was heavily changed, and there were huge pieces of work in other areas of the kernel32.dll (being split into kernel32 and kernelbase). Under the hood, Windows 7 tries to stay as compatible as possible, but it was a huge effort internally with lots of changes, and the numbering (6.1) was somewhat deceptive.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by frojack on Monday March 20 2017, @04:37AM (5 children)
As Microsoft releases go, win 7 was actually a pretty good OS. Probably the last decent OS they've made. (Again, with the caveat that we are talking only about windows here). Some would go so far as to say that Window 7 is the best OS Microsoft has ever delivered.
Its relatively light weight, wit will fit in much less memory than most people think, and works rather well.
Win 7 pretty well repaired the reputation damage Vista had done.
The big problem is that they stepped away from that in windows 8, and 8.1 and pursued that banal interface which brought the whole ecosystem to its knees again.
Two self inflicted wounds in the span of 3 to 5 years.
Then they decided to make Windows 10 an advertising platform, just when people are showing signs of having had it up to HERE with advertising and un- apologetically started using ad-blockers.
Nobody will miss vista. But a lot of users will miss Windows 7.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by julian on Monday March 20 2017, @05:32AM (4 children)
Technically Windows 10 is much better than Windows 7, and worth upgrading to--at least the Pro or Enterprise versions. Just the security improvements are worthwhile, but it's actually lighter on resources than Windows 7. MS doesn't seem to backport their kernel improvements, so Windows 7 is pretty outdated at this point. If you absolutely need Windows, I recommend Windows 10...but you probably don't need Windows.
I still haven't seen any of these ads in Windows 10. Maybe they're not pushing it to Win10 Pro users (yet). I also turn my PC off (fully off with PSU hardware switch) just about every day, so I don't deal with the Windows Update wanting to turn off at inconvenient times problem. I suppose there are people who want their Windows computer to run for months without rebooting, but that's not how I've ever used computers.
If I was having to deal with either of those issues I'd probably hate Windows 10. It does have the spying stuff, but that's been there since XP. I'm aware of it. I don't like it. That's why I have other machines running Linux that get used more often.
(Score: 2) by TheReaperD on Monday March 20 2017, @12:07PM (1 child)
You have to install a tool such as Spybot anti-beacon in order to keep the ads out of Windows 10 (running it myself). Otherwise, forget it.
Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit
(Score: 2) by julian on Tuesday March 21 2017, @04:44AM
I've not installed such a tool and I still haven't seen any ads. I'm sure Windows is (or, at least is capable of) spying on everything that goes on in my computer, but that has been true since XP. I already don't trust Windows.
It is networked to my other computers, however. This worries me, since it could be used as a beachhead into my network, other machines, and server not running Windows. I'm not sure how to mitigate this without making the machine impractically inconvenient to use. It has to have access to my NAS, for example.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2017, @12:37PM
Only ignorant idiots recommend Windows 10 for anything but may be games. It is the same idiots that buy consoles. No flavor of Windows 10 has a place in a business environment nor should it be used just for surfing the internet. Spyware and adware simply has no place on any device. Nobody should recommend to anyone to install spyware or adware.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2017, @01:26PM
I don't know about the technical merits, but I know the non-technical problems it has are enough that I wouldn't even install it if it magically turned my computer into a quantum computer.
At some time in the past, Windows was an operating system which I didn't like, but which I would trust (note that I'm speaking about the OS, not Microsoft itself). Nowadays that trust is gone.
(Score: 1) by WillR on Monday March 20 2017, @04:15PM