I don’t think that it’s much of a surprise to say that Windows 10, while a decent idea, in theory, has been a bit of a disaster in practice.

If you had Windows 7 (or Windows 8, bless your heart), the upgrade was pretty hard to avoid. It got so bad that there were a few die-hard Windows XP and Windows 7 users that made scripts that would stop or dismiss the upgrade “suggestions” that Microsoft made almost impossible to avoid or dismiss.

However, you are still using Windows as an operating system, you really should be running on Windows 10. The number of vulnerabilities in previous versions of Windows (some of which will never be fixed) is somewhat staggering.

Microsoft has shown its willingness to support older Windows versions when things get catastrophic, by releasing an update to close the vulnerability in Windows RDP protocol, but I doubt they will do this for much longer.

Windows 7 EoL

Microsoft has said that Windows 7 will no longer be supported after January 14, 2020.

Large companies (that often have hundreds of licenses and proprietary software custom-built for a specific OS) have a little bit longer. Microsoft is allowing those companies to pay for additional time for Windows 7 support. But those payments double each year, and they will not continue past 2023. After that, even those companies will have to upgrade or continue on without any security updates.

So if you’ve been holding on to Windows 7, now is the time to switch. And if you’ve been waiting since you though missed the free Windows 7/8 to Windows 10 update, you may not be out of luck!

Windows 10 Update

It looks like the free upgrade (which officially ended in December of 2017) may still be around. This post on BleepingComputer gives the details.

If you’ve been holding off on the upgrade because of the rocky Windows 10 start, that’s been fixed sort of. There are still lots of issues with the Windows update quality and stability, but it is a bit easier now to delay the automatic updates.

I, for one, have been really enjoying using my macOS and Linux systems, and on my next desktop upgrade (which is the only platform I have running Windows), I may finally move that to a Unix-based platform too.

If you insist on running Windows, find out how you can get Windows 10 for free here.