Ugly Duckling

Published by Gordon Chase in Windows 8 discontinued support · Wednesday 13 Jan 2016
Tags: win8, ie8, ie9, ie10, discontinued, no, updates

This affects Windows 8 (not Windows 8.1) January 13, 2016

3 years, 2 months, and 17-days ago Microsoft release Windows 8, today Microsoft completely disowns it. That means Windows 8 is being treated the same as Windows XP, no more security updates, no bug fixes, nothing.

What does this mean for you?

Well if you haven't been running Windows updates until now, then nothing has changed, as long as you are running a decent anti-virus and NOT using Internet Explorer (Microsoft has also dropped all support for every version of Internet Explorer except IE11)

Please use either Firefox or Chrome.

You should be aware of all the caveats, just as for those of you still running XP. There are faults in your operating system which could leave vulnerabilities, but these have always been there, it's just that Microsoft is no longer looking for them or fixing them. Lets just hope they don't tell all the hackers how to exploit these weaknesses as they did when they dumped XP.

Now for those of you paying attention, you will note that Vista (almost as unpopular as 8) has not been mentioned. That is because support for Vista remains in place until April 11, 2017

If your PC or Laptop is running Windows 8 then it is well and truly capable of running Windows 10.

If you wish to upgrade to Windows 10, please do so (or contact me if you don't know how) unless you have very limited data on your internet plan, or your internet is very slow. If this is the case contact me and we will put Win10 on from an upgrade DVD.