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posted by mrpg on Wednesday March 13 2019, @07:20AM   Printer-friendly
from the no dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

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.


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 13 2019, @02:46PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 13 2019, @02:46PM (#813736)

    ..so who cares if Windows 7 support is ending?

    Well, let me put it this way, remember when XP support oozlumed?

    The FUD campaign mounted at that time forced a hell of a lot of us into supporting (at best) Win7, (at worst) Vista and Win8 'roll outs' as some of our employers started bleating about security, compliance etc. etc. Who can forget the fun weeks spent trying to get some of our software (which even the writers said wouldn't work 100% on Win7) into a state of 90% working just so that some clueless fuckwit of a technically ignorant manglement suit (who only got the job thanks to our old friend N.Epotism) could 'tick the boxes' on a 'we've gone 100% Win7' report to senior manglement?

    Then there was the home 'IT guy' support nightmares of dealing with failed XP->whatever 'upgrades', and remember the double dose of fun when people found that their existing systems couldn't run Vista/Win7 so then had to go out and buy Vista/Win7 ready systems only to find that they were barely capable of running the OS let alone anything on top of it?

    The nonsense I had to put up with at the XP EOL, and the shit that came attached with Win10 support forced my hand, I no longer support any Windows variants on anything other than my own equipment, so yes, that means no MS IT support work at anything other than at application level. Life is way too short, and I'm north of 50.

    So, do I care about the end of support?, do I fuck...I still run XP on a couple of boxes (as I'll be fucked if I'm going to fork out a couple of grand for newer versions of the software that runs on them) and It'll be the same with running Win7 as a tertiary OS on this laptop and its mate, it'll be here until the hardware fails, or until I no longer need to run the Windows software that's installed on them (Hell, I've even got a Win98 VM which started off life inhabiting a hunk of Fujitsu spinning rust (M1636TAU) in a Pentium 120 system many, many moons ago which I fire up on occasion to check some old circuit designs...best laugh is that the spinning rust still exists and works, the P120 is somewhere in the loft so I cant comment on it's usability).

    So, I don't care, but there'll be a lot of IT support wonks out there who'll dread the approach of this deadline, not because of any technical 'challenges', but politically as it means having to deal with the usual FUD aimed at manglement, but now with added cloudy goodness(sic) thrown in. Better get those brick walls padded now folks...

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 13 2019, @03:05PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 13 2019, @03:05PM (#813752)

    Hey grandpa, do yourself a favor and install a non-Micro$oft operating system. And no, it won't cost you a dime but instead probably will make your older hardware usable again. I know it's supposedly hard to get out of an abusive relationship, especially if long but I hear it's well worth it.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 13 2019, @04:35PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 13 2019, @04:35PM (#813799)

      Hey grandpa, do yourself a favor and install a non-Micro$oft operating system. And no, it won't cost you a dime but instead probably will make your older hardware usable again. I know it's supposedly hard to get out of an abusive relationship, especially if long but I hear it's well worth it.

      Hmm, most of my systems dual/multiple boot, these are the currently installed OSes (we won't go into bootable USB HDs and sticks and what lurks on them....)

      This laptop: Slackware (running), Kali, Win7
      Other laptop: PCLinuxOS, Win7, Haiku
      Netbook: Win7, Kali

      Firewall: PCLinuxOS (Heavily modified from stock install, lots of fun 'bespoke' code)
      Firewall-in-development: Slackware (Update of the code developed for the PCLinuxOS one...now with teeth, so to speak...), boring old pfsense
      NAS/Fileserver: FreeBSD

      Desktop1: Slackware,Win7
      Desktop2: Slackware, XP, Haiku
      Desktop3: Devuan
      Desktop4: XP, PCLinuxOS
      Desktop5: Slackware, Haiku

      ThinClient1: Tiny Core Linux
      ThinClient2: Tiny Core Linux

      Indy1: IRIX 6.5.22
      Indy2: OpenBSD

      SPARCclassic: OpenBSD
      SPARCstation IPX: Sunos 4.1.4

      Most of the PCs are Dual-Core, with one Quad-core cuckoo in the nest, some of them have 4GB ram, most have 2GB. I only run Win XP for 'legacy' DAW (I'm migrating gradually to Reaper, which will run on Slackware), Win7 for CAD/CAM/ECAD and Graphics design (The usual suspects, but mostly Coreldraw, yup, Corel, even with it's myriad braindeath inducing WTFs I prefer it to Illustrator...go figure..)

      In keeping with my grandpa status, I have also been known to spend way too much time pissing around in emulated pdp-10s, mostly running TOPS-20, dreaming of the glory days of code hacking on the old DECSYSTEM-20...like MAME emulated versions of the arcade games of yore, better than nothing, but it just ain't the same....

      (I'd say something about getting off my lawn, but you'd be hard put to get on it, seeing as the boat is currently taking up most of the space...)