Spotted by way of the ever-alert Mark Wyciślik-Wilson for BetaNews, Microsoft has used blog publish selling its Microsoft 365 subscription provider to quietly announce it’ll start taking bills for extended security support for Windows 7 customers at the end of the month.
Why pay? Because Windows 7 is dying. Free protection support will stop on January 14, 2020, and the simplest way to hold the usage of the working machine accurately is to pay Microsoft as much as $2 hundred in line with year per PC – a price Microsoft states “will growth each yr.”
Frustrated? If you’re a home consumer, things get more robust still because you received’t even have the option to pay. A disgrace, while a few Windows 7 assist packages might be as cheap as $25 in line with the year.
As it stands (however, I count on lengthy-term), Microsoft will most straightforward offer paid extended safety guide to businesses. And with Windows 7 still accounting for 34% of all Windows PCs used globally (supply), this puts thousands and thousands of home and small enterprise users at a crossroads: pay to exchange to Windows 10 (with all its modern ills) or prepare to learn an alternative including Linux/Mac OS.