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GWX redux? Microsoft to start nagging Windows 7 users about upcoming EOL.
Making the transition to Windows 10 and Office 365
After 10 years, support for Windows 7 is coming to an end on January 14, 2020, with Office 2010 following shortly thereafter. We are here to help you with recommendations for what to do next and answer questions that you may have about end of support.
End of support means that your Windows 7 or Office 2010 software will no longer receive updates, including security updates. But, there's good news – Windows 10 is the most secure Windows ever and Office 365 delivers the latest in personal productivity. Together they make a perfect pair to help you do everything you were doing before – safer, faster and easier.
To help our customers get advanced notice of this change, we are reaching out with information and resources. Beginning next month, if you are a Windows 7 customer, you can expect to see a notification appear on your Windows 7 PC. This is a courtesy reminder that you can expect to see a handful of times in 2019. By starting the reminders now, our hope is that you have time to plan and prepare for this transition. These notifications are designed to help provide information only and if you would prefer not to receive them again, you'll be able to select an option for "do not notify me again," and we will not send you any further reminders. Just as software has changed over the years, so has hardware. To learn more about the latest line-up of modern PCs and information for moving from Windows 7 to Windows 10, just click on the "learn more" button on the notification.
If you want to get started today, you can visit www.microsoft.com/windows7 to find out more.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 13 2019, @09:14AM (2 children)
I've spent the last decade in an IT consultancy / geek for hire role. Xp and Vista EOL was painful enough - my rule was you better have a good reason, then I'll help you shoot yourself in the foot more slowly (systems controlling vinyl cutters that didn't go online, embedded stand alone systems that stayed offline were the fair-er ones).
7 being EOL is going to be a shit storm. Enough that it's time to make a clean break from the field. My life is miserable enough without transitioning to an in-house role where the same painful crap will find me regardless.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 13 2019, @11:33AM
I made the transition away from all tech support several years ago. I told all of my clients that I would not support any systems they added that ran Win 8 or higher, or Server 2016 or higher. It took a couple of years, but I shed them all. Now I only do consulting and custom programming but never have to deal with support or OSes (except for some Linux server admin).
Much less stress, no more emergency calls, no more dealing with workstations, servers, networks, etc on weekends and holidays to avoid client downtime.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by stormreaver on Wednesday March 13 2019, @11:36AM
I've just finished the rolling upgrade of five of my house's 6 Kubuntu computers from 16.04 to 18.04 (I skipped 17.04 for all but one computer) painlessly. All I had to do post-installation was to change the new, stupid double-click by default setting (someone got hit by a stick from the stupid tree) back to the superior single-click, and set one computer back to auto-hide the taskbar.
Aside from those, it was a painless upgrade: Being a Linux system, all the installed apps were automatically upgraded to new versions for me with new features. As is usually the case with Kubuntu, the upgrade produced a BETTER system, unlike with Windows where upgrades usually produce a worse user experience. It even appears that some program crashes were fixed (such as krunner).
I always cringe when my coworkers have to install new versions of Windows (I run Linux exclusively at work, too). It usually takes them days of re-installations and re-configurations before they are productive again, whereas I'm productive again a few minutes after the upgrade reboot is done.