Until the end of the free support of Windows 7, there was only a year left

How many years ago, Microsoft announced the introduction of five-year extended support for its Windows 7 operating system. The period of January 14, 2020 will end - exactly one year later.

But Windows 7 and after that will not lose support. It will, only Microsoft will continue to maintain its OS for the money. Many companies using this particular operating system on work computers, laptops and special equipment will pay to keep receiving updates.

Extended Security Updates (ESU), this type of support is called, is also limited in time. The duration is three years, and every year the prices for Microsoft services will become ever higher.

Those users who are subscribers of Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) will receive support for free. The service offers virtual machines running "in the cloud", on which Windows 7 is installed, plus any necessary applications. These virtuals will receive an update for free, up to the expiration of the extended support work.

A similar situation develops with Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 - after a year, support for these operating systems is coming to a logical conclusion.

By the way, a couple of days ago, a new update for Windows 7 "broke" this operating system. Instead of raising the level of computer protection with the "seven", the update brought new problems. For example, local users who are members of the local Administrators group have a problem with remote access on computers running Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7.

Now the problem was partially localized. Microsoft has released update KB4487345, eliminating some errors. At the same time, the package is not available for automatic updating, in order to install it, you will have to download the patch manually.

Early last week, developers released hotfixes KB4480960 and KB4480970 for Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1. It was they who caused a large number of failures in the operating system. System users had various errors, including KMS Activation error, Not Genuine and 0xc004f200.

As it turned out , the previously installed patch KB971033 began to conflict with KB4480960 and KB4480970. This patch was not intended to be installed in the Key Management Service (KMS) environment, although so far no problems have been observed with them. The corporation offers to solve the problem, delete KB971033, clear the KMS cache and delete the operating system activation data from the PC. After that, the system must be re-activated via KMS. In addition, you can simply not use the updates KB4480960 and KB4480970.

It is worth noting that in the new year, Windows 7, for the first time in many years, lost its leading place in the list of the most popular desktop operating systems. In place of the "seven" came the "dozen", which led the top. In this case, Microsoft believed that the change of leaders will occur much earlier. So, in the first months after the release of Windows 10, the number of its users grew very quickly.

At that time, the corporation assumed that in just a couple of years over a billion devices would work on Windows 10. But over time, the process of switching users to Windows 10 went slower. And the operating system received its 500 million users only by May 2017. This takes into account not only laptops and desktops, but also the Xbox, as well as augmented reality glasses Hololens.

Already in September 2018, Windows 10 worked on 700 million devices.


Market structure of desktop operating systems in December 2018, according to VentureBeat

In December 2018, Windows 10 accounts for about 39.22% of the desktop operating system market. Windows 7 takes 36.9%. In the summer of 2015, Windows 7 was installed on more than 60% of computers. Well, the G8 accounts for 5.33% of the operating system market.

macOS, in turn, is installed on about 10% of devices. Desktop versions of Linux gained 2.78% of the market. According to Venture Beat, about 86.2% of the market is controlled by Microsoft operating systems.