Earlier this year, Microsoft had started issuing end of support notifications for Windows 7 Home users, informing them of the inevitable. The company is now extending these notifications to owners of Windows 7 Pro PCs, excluding devices “that are domain-joined as a part of an IT-managed infrastructure” said the company in an updated blog post.
Users can expect the “courtesy reminder” to appear a “handful of times” this year, and as before, the company hopes that the remaining couple of months would give Windows 7 consumers enough time to plan a transition, which Microsoft recommends should be to Windows 10 along with Office 365 for productivity, advising users of Office 2010 to upgrade their environment before the software reaches its end of support on October 13, 2020.
The importance of this announcement comes from the fact that although enterprise customers of Windows 7 can pay on a per-PC basis for extended support, many consumers have refrained from updating their Windows 7 PCs to Windows 10. While their concerns are legitimate, given the latter’s reputation for patchy patches, Microsoft says that since it won’t be giving technical support, software updates or issue security fixes for Windows 7 after it reaches end of support, devices using this OS run a greater risk of getting viruses or malware with continued use.
For anyone still wondering, Microsoft’s stance on the matter is pretty clear by now and reflects the company’s multi-year effort in informing and convincing its enormous userbase in shifting towards Windows 10, which was running over 900 million devices as of last month.
