Microsoft ends updates for Windows 7/8.1 on new processors

For example, Windows 10 will be the only supported Windows platform on Intel’s upcoming “Kaby Lake” silicon, Qualcomm’s upcoming “8996” silicon, and AMD’s upcoming “Bristol Ridge” silicon. Microsoft warned Vista users that their systems could be compromised by an attacker in the future, especially as Security Essentials support has also now ended for the operating system.

Anyone on an affected system who attempts to download Windows update may see an error message, according to a knowledgebase article published last week (). Users can check out the specs needed to run Windows 10 here, but even still, there is no easy upgrade path. Microsoft’s offer of a free upgrade to Windows 10 expired on 29 July 2016, and didn’t apply to Vista users anyway. A recent Windows Insider build, for instance, marked itself with the expected version number 1703 using Microsoft’s year and month designation, a sure sign of an impending launch. Systems that aren’t on the supported list will lose access to updates for older Windows versions as of July 17, 2018. We’re close to Microsoft signing-off on the Creators Update now, so these builds should be “final build” quality. You can go to Settings Update & security Windows Update to see if you need to restart your PC.

Marking a connection as metered is the only way for Windows 10 Home users to prevent Windows from updating.

“May” certainly suggests a level of ambiguity here, and InfoWorld, which initially brought the update to light, points out that the new policy doesn’t appear to have been implemented yet.

We’ve known for a long time that Windows 7 has been the greatest challenge to Windows 10 adoption, but now there’s more validation of that.

“The official word from Microsoft is that they are in fact doing everybody a justice by insuring that everybody updates to Windows 10 because Windows 10 works very close to the silicon and squeezes out all of the performance”, Berg says in his video. “We don’t plan to send large updates over metered connections, but could use this for critical fixes if needed in the future”, Microsoft said.