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Holdouts to Windows 7, 8.1, and 8.1 RT won't be able to ping Microsoft's own forums for tech support from the company anymore.
The Redmond software behemoth announced on Friday that, come next month, its staff will no longer be combing the official forums for 13 outdated products to offer support advice and assistance. Users will still be able to access the forums and get advice from each one, albeit without feedback from a Microsoft employee.
"There will be no proactive reviews, monitoring, answering or answer marking of questions," Microsoft said in announcing the move.
[...] Customers are still able to get paid support from Microsoft through to the end of the extended support periods.
In addition to the three outdated versions of Windows, Microsoft is pulling the plug on official forum support for the Office 2010 and 2013, IE 10, Surface Pro, Surface Pro 2, Surface RT and Surface 2, and Security Essentials. As with Windows 7 and 8.1, those products are all past their official support lifecycle as well.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Thursday June 14 2018, @07:30AM
When I got hit with the FTDI chip nuker through Microsoft Update, I took a much more proactive stance on making sure I was protected against system sabotage.
Things can work for years, then suddenly a middle-of-the-night stranger visits, then I discover things don't work right.
If you are on WIN7 and want to stay that way, use CloneZilla or something like it to get backups of your disk image while you still have a operable system.
If anything, should you get a backdoor visit, and discover you are trashed, you can get your system back, and sever connection to the net until someone finds out what they did and how to patch against it happening again.
It seems when one is a business-man, he has someone else to blame when things go south... he is very apt to use "business grade" software that fails in this manner.
My stance is different because I am the someone else that will be blamed.
I know the powers that be are trying everything they know to herd us all onto win10, and I have a nagging feeling that I am soon to be shown why. My own take is that our machines will start serving us interstitial ads that we can't turn off, as I am old enough to remember when FM radio had no ads, and TV had a brief ad maybe twice per 30-minute show ( see re-runs of the original black-and-white game shows of the 50's, where it takes 40 minutes to run the old 30 minute show. ).
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]