Goodbye Windows 7

I finally seem to be recovering from a nasty flu that is now wreaking havoc all across my tiny Arctic town – better now than when we hit -40 I guess – so let’s talk about something that’s not going to recover because it actually just fucking died: Windows 7.

For nearly everyone, support for Windows 7 ended on January 14th, 2020. However, if you were a business who needed more time to migrate off of it because your CEO didn’t listen to the begging and pleading IT department until a week before the deadline, Microsoft did have an option for you. Businesses could pay to get up to 3 years of extra security updates. This pushes the EOL date for Windows 7 to January 10th, 2023.

Okay but that’s still nearly 2 years earlier than October 8th, 2024?
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I’d like to solve the puzzle! It’s POSReady, isn’t it? Of course it is! Windows Embedded POSReady’s support finally ended a few days ago, and this means that for all intents and purposes, Windows 7 is well and truly dead. In case you happen to be a paleontologist, think of Windows Embedded POSReady adding an extra two years of support to Windows 7 as the mammoths who managed to survive on Wrangel until as late as only 4000 years ago.

Windows 7 was one of the good ones, for sure, and all else being equal, I’d choose it over any of the releases that cam after. It feels like Windows 7 was the last release designed primarily for users of the Windows platform, whereas later releases were designed more to nickle and dime people with services, ads, and upsells that greatly cheapened the operating system. I doubt we’ll ever see such a return to form again, so Windows 7 might as well be the last truly beloved Windows release.

If you’re still using Windows 7 – please don’t, unless you’re doing it for the retrocomputing thrill. I know Windows 8, 10, and 11 are scary, and as much as it pains me to say this, you’re better off with 10 or 11 at this point, if only for security concerns.