Microsoft has stopped sales of OEM licenses of Windows 7 Professional and Windows 8.1
It is over they said, Microsoft yesterday stopped providing PC makers the Windows 7 Professional and Windows 8.1 licenses to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). That means any system that is produced from today onward would have Windows 10 instead.
Some years ago, Microsoft announced that they were stopping the sales of the popular Windows 7 family which consisted of (Windows 7 Home Basic, Windows 7 Home Premium, and Windows 7 Ultimate licenses) to OEMs.
Now fast-forward to 2 years after Microsoft has done the same thing it did to the predecessors of the Windows 7 Pro, leaving Windows 10 as the only remaining option, assuming you want a PC with a Microsoft operating system.
Using this technique Microsoft is trying to slowly phase out old OS’s thereby making everyone adopt the new one (Windows 1o) in time.
The Tech giant have a Windows Lifecycle chart for sales, and it doesn’t contain the end date for Windows 10, and the reason for that is obvious- it doesn’t have a successor yet.
It’s also worth noting that Mainstream Support for Windows 7 ended on January 13, 2015.
With this new update you can no longer get a PC that comes with Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 pre-installed but nevertheless Microsoft is still supporting the operating system for many years to come, as you can see in the graph above the extended support for Windows 7 is January 14, 2020 and for Windows 8 is January 10, 2030 that means you can get security patches until those period of time for the respective OS.
Windows 7 has passed its mainstream support period but Windows 8.1 is in mainstream support until 2018. So that means if you are using these operating system you are safe for now.
There are words around on the internet which can serve as a good news for those of you desperately looking for a Windows 7 Professional or Windows 8.1 license: retailers like Newegg are still have some official OEM licenses in stock. However, once it runs out, that’s pretty much it for older versions of Windows.
So pls tell me if there is any reason you would want to stick with Windows 7 or the buggy Windows 8.1 today. When you get a Windows 10 Computer you are sure of support for years to come which also includes new features and updates for free.