Believe it or not, Windows 7 gained market share in March and April 2018. Even now, Windows 10, which arrived not quite three years ago, is running on only 39.3% of all Windows PCs, compared to Windows 7’s 47.3%. Why? Simple: A lot of uerss prefer Windows 7 to Windows 10. (The less said of Windows 8.x the better.) And Windows 7 extended support won’t end until 14 January 2020.
Microsoft is looking to wind down the clock by making updates larger and staff no longer answering Windows 7 questions on the Microsoft Community Forum – a tactic users of Windows 8.1, 8.1 RT, Internet Explorer 10, Surface Pro, Surface Pro 2, Surface RT, Surface 2 and Office 2010/2013 will be famililar with.
Windows 7 patches have been putting on weight since October 2016, when Microsoft started releasing Windows 7 patches that included all the previous months’ patches.
There are two problems with this. First, those patch rollups are heading to 300Mb to 500Mb in size. Second, since every month’s plump patch package installs every fix since October 2016, if any patch breaks something, anything, the entire rollup fails.
And this just in, also from Woody Leonhard: “Even though Microsoft says it’s supporting Win7 until January 14, 2020, if you have an older machine – including any Pentium III – you’ve been blocked, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
An eagle-eyed AskWoody denizen, DAVe3283, noted that prior to 15 June 2018, the June Monthly Rollup article KB 4284826 and the Security-only article KB 4284867 no longer promised that “Microsoft is working on a resolution and will provide an update in an upcoming release” for older systems.
Sometime on or after 15 June, the June KB articles for both the Monthly Rollup and the Security-only update were modified to remove the ‘Known issue’ and its resolution. All of the prior KB articles were also changed to include this bit of advice: “Upgrade your machines with a processor that supports SSE2 or virtualise those machines.”
Microsoft’s message is that a Windows 10 upgrade is inevitable and best gotten over with before deadline but there are many die hard users with other ideas.
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