Windows 7 RTM Support Ending Soon 173
jones_supa writes with this news from Ars Technica: "Windows 7 users will have to install Service Pack 1 if they want to continue to receive security fixes and other support beyond April 9th. With the release of a Service Pack, Microsoft's policy is to support the old version for two years. Windows 7 Service Pack 1 was released on 22nd February, 2011, so the phasing out of support is happening more or less on schedule. In spite of a growing number of post-Service Pack 1 fixes and updates, Microsoft has shown no signs of shipping a second Service Pack. Should Service Pack 1 be the sole major update for Windows 7, it will continue to receive mainstream support — which encompasses both security updates, non-security bugfixes, and free phone support — until 13th January 2015. Extended support — security fixes and paid incidents only — will continue until 14th January 2020."
Not Surprising (Score:2, Interesting)
I dropped my RFTM support for Windows after XP (and went with Linux), after MS decided to rename things and provide a near useless search function, since it does not include the old names in the search with links to newly re-named things.
Linux might not be much better with the different init and configuration systems, but I am NOT going to paying in order to put up with that. It's especially not worth dropping a few thousand dollars to install Microsoft's OSs on all my systems if they're going to speed up the end of life cycle...