Windows 7 users do not appear to want to give up their operating system despite the looming end-of-life deadline, at least going by the latest report from one analytics firm.
NetMarketShare’s statistics for the desktop OS market in April showed that Windows 10 gained a little ground, moving up from 43.62% to 44.1%, essentially an uptick of half a percentage point, a solid enough increase, if a little modest.
However, Windows 7 didn’t cede that ground to Microsoft’s newest operating system, with the migration seemingly coming from outside Windows (with Mac usage declining). Indeed, Windows 7 barely dropped at all, moving from 36.52% in March to 36.43% for April; a shift of just 0.09% (not far from the margins of statistical error, we’d assume).
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Furthermore, we have to remember that while Windows 7 was shedding users last year, at the start of 2019 in January, the old operating system actually edged up almost a third of a percentage point to 37.19% according to NetMarketShare.
In other words, in December 2018 Windows 7 adoption stood at 36.9%, and it has barely moved at all since, with a slight decrease to 36.43% – not even a half percentage point drop throughout the entirety of the year so far.
Do panic!
And all this is happening against a backdrop of Microsoft starting to wave its hands around in an increasingly frantic manner about support for the old OS ending in January 2020. That includes urging users to upgrade to Windows 10 (hmm, that sounds familiar), and more recently messages declaring that "support for Windows 7 is nearing an end".
Which, of course, it very much is, and there’s a genuine urgency here given that at the start of next year, Microsoft will no longer be providing any updates or security fixes for Windows 7. That could put you at risk from all sorts of potential holes and exploits that will be left open in the operating system going forward.
Still, that didn’t stop tons of folks unwisely sticking with Windows XP well past its security expiry date, because it was a well-liked operating system, and given that the same is true of Windows 7 – and many people dislike various facets of Windows 10, with plenty of controversy on the privacy front in the past for one thing – it looks like we can probably expect a similar scenario here. And that means similar opportunities for malware peddlers and other exploit-leveraging ne’er-do-wells to capitalize on PCs which aren’t properly defended, sadly.
At any rate, if you are planning on making the leap to Windows 10, we’ve got a full guide on how to prepare for Windows 7 end of life right here.
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Via Softpedia
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