On EXISTING computers, Windows 7 will be fully supported until Jan. 2020
Existing computers with the 5th generation or earlier Intel CPU. Existing computers with Skylake (6th gen) are considered stepping stone machines and will have Windows 7 and 8.1 support revoked in the middle of next year. Microsoft is only saying they will try to fix security problems, but they make no guarantees.
is vastly better than what you get in the Apple world
But vastly worse than you get in the Linux world.
Existing Windows 7 machines will be fully supported until Jan. 2020, and existing Windows 8 machines will be fully supported until Jan.2023. That’s over ten years of full support. It’s processors that came out years after these OS’s that won’t get full support.
No doubt.
Admission: I might be unfairly biased against Linux. My experience using it as my main system was with Corel Linux. (Because my sister worked on the packaging and manuals, that’s why.) And in the '80s I did tech support on software running on NCR Tower Unix, Microsoft Xenix and SCO Unix.
Some times I still wake up screaming.
Now I get it. Thanks.
I really don’t see what large organizations, especially, get from using Windows for laptops instead of having a couple of full-time people dedicated to setting up and distributing linux images. I use all three major OSs on a daily basis, so I think I’m in a good position to say that Windows is a fucking nightmare. The Linux boxes I work on are routinely up for over a year between reboots, which is a pretty good standard to set for a professional OS. I restart my mac at home about 3 times a year for critical security updates. That seems like a pretty good standard to set for consumer OSs. Windows, OTOH, either on it’s own for updates, or because something broke, requires multiple reboots every week. I don’t see why anyone would voluntarily put up with that, and it’s not like it’s not possible to do a whole lot better, since every serious operating system out there does.
Working as a 1st line support agent I’m not so concerned with the coming win10 upgrade, more with the fact that the company I’m servicing will remove all users local admins… so many angry calls in my future… almost makes me wish I’d gotten an education 
(apparently no one else besides DK thinks that Bookseller is an education)
Not supported doesn’t mean “doesn’t work”, though. It seems to me as if this is a CYA move to say “Skylake and newer Intel processors have lots of new stuff that will be too much of a pain to support in Windows 8 and earlier so we can only guarantee full compatibility in Windows 10”.
It’s not like there’s anything preventing you from running Windows XP, Windows 95, OS/2, or hell, DOS 1.0 on a Skylake machine if you really wanted to go that route.
They’ll run. The point is that Windows 7 and 8.1 - still in common use - won’t get some security updates.
Of course this only applies to new systems with Skylake, so you’ll likely be getting Windows 10 anyway. If you’re upgrading your hardware, Broadwell-based machines and other processors aren’t going to disappear any time soon.
Windows, OTOH, either on it’s own for updates, or because something broke, requires multiple reboots every week.
No it doesn’t. I usually reboot my main pc around once a month to install updates.
No. They are supporting it now but will stop doing so July 2017. Things that work now may stop working then. They are going to continue to issue patches for sever security problems, but only if it isn’t difficult to do so.
After July of 2017, new hardware will absolutely require Windows 10.
[citation needed]
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/skylake-support
I should clarify, by new hardware I meant systems using a 6th generation (or newer) Intel chip. To keep running Windows 7, you need to buy a 5th gen (or earlier) Intel chip.
Seriously? Office, and Outlook/Exchange. If there was a serious competitor to that they would move.
Support for when things go sideways having a big house like Microsoft or RedHat to call up counts for a whole lot in the corporate world. Companies like having a vendor to call for major issues rather than just asking on support forums.
Yet it doesn’t say that they will stop working, just that they will no longer be supported and ineligible for certain updates. I don’t see the big deal personally.
Yeah. I read pretty deeply into it when it was announced and basically Microsoft said “for old OSes, we’re going to de-prioritize new hardware. If it works anyway, great. If not, oh well. 5th gen and earlier still works. Upgrade if you’re annoyed.”
I don’t think that’s unreasonable per se. And I’m primarily a *NIX user.
Since any pretty-big sized company should be testing all patches before deploying them, I’m not even that annoyed with this update. 
I’ll be super amused if this patch rolls out to the environment I support though. Although MS has a pretty good point if the patches aren’t being tested. Foul play but a good point.
As announced months ago, this offer does not trigger on machines tied to WSUS unless you specifically release the Windows 10 Offer KB. It also won’t trigger on systems that are running Enterprise level Windows, or on ones that do not have either the Group Policy or registry key to block the Windows 10 offer.
So yeah, if you don’t have Enterprise software for your enterprise environment and your admins have not just failed to use any of the three methods to block this offer but have explicitly enabled this offer by releasing the KB into their environment, then they kind of deserve this reminder to stay on top of important system administration things.
It’s 3035583
There’s a lot to be said for being an autodidact. But if my own case and most of my tech school classmates were any indication, it often leads to learning bad habits, and having rather incomplete knowledge.
At least on computers and networking. College was valuable to me, not because I learned windows server, or because I was taught how to terminate cat5 cable, or how the telephone system works. It was valuable because I was taught how to properly apply group policy settings, how to set file and folder permissions correctly, and exactly how bad windows is compared with nearly anything else.
That’s the old evil number. The claim is that MS has now secreted upgrade nags into “Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer 11 for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems (KB3139929)”
Secreted is right.
… I was going to post a gif. But they were all… too gross.
I’m no fan of Windows but years of working in corporate environments, the above is a short summary of my experience.
