With Windows 7 recently surpassing 400 million copies sold, Windows Vista is slowly but surely losing market share to Windows 7. However, many consumers and corporations still use Vista everyday and Microsoft has an obligation to support the operating system for a few more years. Nevertheless, today sees the end of support for Windows Vista SP1.
As reported on the Windows Team Blog, Microsoft has ended support for Windows Vista SP1 and is urging customers to upgrade to SP2 in order to continue receiving updates for the OS. Windows Vista SP2 will continue to be supported until “24 months after the next service pack releases or at the end of the product’s support lifecycle, whichever comes first.”
Further information is available at Microsoft’s End of Support page. As Microsoft notes, an unsupported OS “will no longer receive software updates from Windows Update. These include security updates that can help protect your PC from harmful viruses, spyware, and other malicious software, which can steal your personal information. Windows Update also installs the latest software updates to improve the reliability of Windows—new drivers for your hardware and more.”
Further reading: Microsoft, SP1, Windows Vista
