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Windows 7 Will Get Updates for Four More Years -- If You Pay (zdnet.com)
An anonymous reader quotes ZDNet:
With the Windows 7 end-of-support clock slowly winding down to January 14, 2020, Microsoft is announcing it will offer, for a fee, continuing security updates for the product through January 2023. This isn't the first time Microsoft has done this for a version of Windows, but it may be the first time it has been so public about its plans to do so.
The paid Windows 7 Extended Security Updates (ESUs) will be sold on a per-device basis, with the price increasing each year. These ESUs will be available to any Windows 7 Professional and Windows 7 Enterprise users with volume-licensing agreements, and those with Windows Software Assurance and/or Windows 10 Enterprise or Education subscriptions will get a discount. Office 365 ProPlus will continue to work on devices with Windows 7 Extended Security Updates through January 2023.
The paid Windows 7 Extended Security Updates (ESUs) will be sold on a per-device basis, with the price increasing each year. These ESUs will be available to any Windows 7 Professional and Windows 7 Enterprise users with volume-licensing agreements, and those with Windows Software Assurance and/or Windows 10 Enterprise or Education subscriptions will get a discount. Office 365 ProPlus will continue to work on devices with Windows 7 Extended Security Updates through January 2023.
We stopped patching Win7 2+ yrs ago when the EULA changed to allow their spying and when MSFT stopped saying what each patch was for.
It just became too hard to deal with MSFT.
We had little choice. MSFT decided to fire us by forcing things into the agreement we just couldn't agree with.
You nailed it. I run Monte Carlo simulations of electron induced X-ray microanalysis spectra. These can run for hours. I want control of my CPU cycles and don't want some update starting without my explicit permission. I have a friend who runs a big microanalysis lab. A rececent MS update broke DCOM and won't let his microanalysis computer talk to the microscope computer. We know of at least one other system with this problem. These are $1M+ systems...
My community does CPU-intensive work and we want control of OUR computers. We understand the need for antivirus/spyware software and are willing to use it. We don't want our OS to treat us like idiots and BE the spyware... We want to give explicit permission for the OS to phone home...
Windows 2000 is what killed desktop Linux. The old 16 bit Windows riding on a DOS was a stability and security nightmare. A lot of power users were ready to leap from Windows to a more stable platform. NT 4 was usable and mostly stable but Microsoft wasn't fully committed until W2K came out.
W2K gave users stability and a practical no-frills desktop. It was so good that many of us almost skipped XP, which was seen as the candyland for mainstream customers, only outdone in this regard by Vista. Late era XP then became the refuge to wait out Vista on.
Microsoft has a history of their older OS versions becoming a hedge against their newer offering. Almost like the way people on Linux resist updating to a SystemD kludge.