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Microsoft Confirms It Is Dropping Windows 8.1 Support
snydeq (1272828) writes "Microsoft TechNet blog makes clear that Windows 8.1 will not be patched, and that users must get Windows 8.1 Update if they want security patches, InfoWorld's Woody Leonhard reports. 'In what is surely the most customer-antagonistic move of the new Windows regime, Steve Thomas at Microsoft posted a TechNet article on Saturday stating categorically that Microsoft will no longer issue security patches for Windows 8.1, starting in May,' Leonhard writes. 'Never mind that Windows 8.1 customers are still having multiple problems with errors when trying to install the Update. At this point, there are 300 posts on the Microsoft Answers forum thread 'Windows 8.1 Update 1 Failing to Install with errors 0x80070020, 80073712 and 800F081F.' The Answers forum is peppered with similar complaints and a wide range of errors, from 800F0092 to 80070003, for which there are no solutions from Microsoft. Never mind that Microsoft itself yanked Windows 8.1 Update from the corporate WSUS update server chute almost a week ago and still hasn't offered a replacement.'"
Apple doesn't support more than one version of iOS. If you want to fix a problem with 6.1.2, you get to go to whatever version is current (7.1). You don't get to go to 6.1.3, you don't get to go to 7.0.5 or 7.0.6, you go to 7.1. Your choice is "upgrade or don't."
John
Just patch windows 8.1 with the update. It makes the OS unequivocally better. Whining about it is just silly.
Why not upgrade from Windows 8.1 to Windows 7?
Tell him that M$ have done the same old, same old, attempted to correct their failures in the cheapest way possible by shoving the cost back on consumers. Can't get the upgrade to work, suck it up, format, re-install, repatch, re-upgrade and repatch and the restore you back up data, don't have backups, M$ answer to you, well, that's your fault for trusting their software.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
A timely reminder why users should stick with a stable, proven OS such as Win7 (and to a lesser extent, WinXP).
Less fancy unnecessary features like Metro also means less chances for cock-ups to happen.
If MS' intention is to migrate users of older OSes to Win8.1, it is not doing itself any favors here.
At least it fails gracefully with a clean error code. In Linux world it would show up as a dialog with corrupted text and a mysterious "Invalid argument" error message written in some log. ;)
Mostly under Linux the error messages are useful to someone technical. Increasingly other OSes (Windows, OS X, iOS, Android) consider useful error mesages to be not user friendly and just give you a generic "something broke" error that is no use to man nor beast - frequently I'm left digging out tcpdump to diagnose customer's problems because the application itself won't give me any information (yes, even in the system log) - I shouldn't need to tcpdump their IMAP traffic to discover that the server is telling them their password is wrong damnit!
http://blog.nexusuk.org
You know what's even more user-friendly? Just clicking the little update icon in the bottom right corner, entering your root password, and clicking OK.
I know how your type likes to hate on everything Linux without having any clue what you're talking about, but seriously, upgrading your distro isn't rocket science.
In all fairness, fixing a broken update can, however, be close to rocket science :)
I use linux, and will continue to... But in this day and age, with all desktops going towards composite window managers, sucky nvidia drivers is a pain in the ass.
But it's a matter of luck when buying a laptop...
This whole thread is absurd, as are all the people jumping on the "bash MS" bandwagon.
* Microsoft will continue to support 8.1, and everyone here KNOWS that.
* Everyone knows that because Microsoft has a bigger problem with having to support old platforms than any other vendor out there. Many posters here generally know this, too, but are being obtuse so that they can harp about Microsoft ending support for a new platform (which isnt even remotely believable).
* The author of the blog even knows that! The Microsoft technet entry says almost the opposite of what the blogger does-- that 8.1 WILL recieve updates. All he got right is that you do need to install a prereq to get them, like we've seen with countless other OSes. The venerable XP does this, too.
* Half the people gloating over the "bugginess of Windows" are fans of an OS that is experiencing one of the biggest internet vulnerabilties in about a decade in its SSL stack, but thats OK in their eyes somehow because its not packaged with the OS and therefore theyre allowed to be buggy.
* Some people are taking the time to smirk about the confusing version numbering of Win8-- which is doubly hillarious given how ridiculous Linux's versioning was until about a year ago.
* And if I had to guess, the aforementioned problems could possibly be related to the aforementioned heartbleed bug, as we dont know what all was leaked and Microsoft is almost certainly not going to want to go into it.
But yea, dont let that stop the fun.