Microsoft is Making It Harder to Use Windows 7

With less than a year to go until Microsoft ends support for its ten-year-old operating system Windows 7, as many as 43% of enterprises are still running the outdated platform.

Recent research has found that nearly a fifth (17%) of IT departments don’t know when the end of support deadline is (It’s Jan 14, 2020), while 6% are aware of the end of support but have yet to start planning for their migration away from Windows 7.

End of support means that Microsoft will no longer issue security updates for the 10-year-old Windows 7 after Jan. 14, 2020. This poses a serious security risk for organizations to continue running Windows 7 unpatched.

Microsoft has already started to push users to upgrade to Windows 10 if they are using a computer with a newer processor type and an OS older than Windows 10.If a computer has any of the following OS/ Processor combinations, they will be unable to install and patches. The only solution is to upgrade to Windows 10.The specific processor types are:

Intel seventh (7th)-generation processors

AMD “Bristol Ridge”

Qualcomm “8996The specific OS types are:

Windows Server 2012 R2

Windows 8.1

Windows Server 2008 R2

Windows 7With the powerful inventory query function, Syxsense can easily detect if you are exposed with unpatched operating systems running on new hardware.