Windows 7 to lose support in less than one month

Bad news if your Windows XP migration programme is running behind schedule...

Support for Windows 7 will be discontinued in less than one month's time. From January, meanwhile, while users will be peppered with pop-up warnings urging them to upgrade to Windows 10 to enjoy continued security patches.

Corporate users will be able to pay a $125 per PC per year to continue to receive Extended Support from Microsoft after the 14^th January deadline, but consumers are expected to pay for Windows 10 instead.

The pop-up warnings will no doubt come as a surprise to many users - an estimated one-third of desktop and laptop computers are still running Windows 7, according to the latest NetMarketShare figures. That compares to just under 47 per cent for Windows 10 and less than 10 per cent for the various iterations of MacOS.

When Windows XP was finally put out to grass, its usage was running at around 25 per cent.

Many organisations, meanwhile, continue to run Windows 7 (some are even still running Windows XP on various workstations). More than half of NHS Trusts, for example, admit that they are still running Windows 7, with the soon-to-be-unsupported operating system running on more than 200,000 devices.

The challenge for the NHS is that the majority of those iterations are running on sensitive medical devices, making migration a more complex operation.

The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) last year announced a £150 million plan to upgrade all NHS systems to Windows 10 by the time Windows 7 reaches end-of-life. However, the NHS is also an Office 365 E5 licence holder, which means organisations across the health service should be able to benefit from an extra year of Windows 7 support for free.