Essentially, it’s dead

Essentially, it’s dead

If you’re still running Windows 8.1, be advised that Microsoft shut down mainstream support a week ago. Microsoft ended mainstream support for Windows 8.1 on January 9, five years after the operating system’s debut. Essentially, it’s dead, and for the average consumer, Windows 8.1 will remain forever unchanged, with no new features or bug fixes. Instead, Microsoft has migrated the OS to “extended support,” which will provide security updates for another five years, until 2023. In Microsoft’s world view, consumers should have already migrated to Windows 10, a modern OS with big fixes, patches, and period updates.

What this means for you:

While it’s true that Windows 8.1 mainstream support has ended, only security hot fixes will be issued for another five years, it’s hard to make the case to remain on Windows 8.1, an OS that lacks the robustness or security of Windows 10. If nothing else, Microsoft says that you’ll see a higher degradation of performance from the Meltdown and Spectre patches than you will on Windows 10 machines.

Today, Microsoft updates Windows 10 at least monthly, every four months and every eight months. It claims to issue no more service packs for its Windows 10 OS, and all Windows 10 updates are now considered to be cumulative updates. They are big 3GB update deliveries.

Those of you on dial-up may not receive these updates due to the size, and limited time you have on-line, because a 3 GB file download on a 56K dial-up line will take, 19 days 21 hours 13 minutes 6 seconds to transfer 3 Gigabytes at 1.83 KB/sec, DSL customers would need only 28 minutes at a speed of 15 Mbps, and Broadband (Spectrum) is 6 minutes at 65 Mbps. Dish & Satellite customers fall under the DSL line speeds, but are affected by weather and other conditions that may limit a full or complete download.

Windows 10 was released in July 2015 and it has a mainstream support end date of Oct. 13, 2020, with an end of extended support date of Oct. 14, 2025, per Microsoft’s lifecycle fact sheet. For now, organizations can bank on that support timeframe. That is, unless some future “Windows 10.1” release should appear in the interim. So, Windows 8 is dead, Windows 8.1 was dead after January of this year, Windows 7 is still in extended support until 2020, but so many of you still ask for Windows 7, I am sure Microsoft will continue to extend, the extended support due to the lack of upgrading from 7, or 8.1 to 10. It is funny how Windows 7 ends support the same year as 10, but most Windows platforms have a 10 year life cycle, 5 main and 5 extended, but XP ran 14 years, and is STILL being used today. Essentially, it’s dead too! Thanks for reading, and keep your PC secure and your family safer.  Remember at “Hunt Technology”, you always get “Quality Service & Individual Attention” you deserve.  Hunt Technology, 320 Watson St., Ripon WI, 920-290-0936