Mainstream Support for Windows Vista Ends Today

Starting today, Microsoft’s Windows Vista platform enters the extended support period, after benefiting from mainstream support for the past five years.

In addition to Vista, Microsoft has ended mainstream support for Office 2007 as well, urging users to upgrade to newer flavors of its products.

Moving forth, the Redmond-based software giant will continue to provide security updates for all those who are still using these products.

While these will be provided for free, the company will offer other upgrades for the platform, such as stability enhancements and the like, only to those organizations who signed deals with it.

Windows Vista will still receive critical updates from Microsoft until April 10th, 2017. On the company’s support website, Office 2007 is listed as benefiting from this extended period of updates only through October 10th, 2017.

Initially, the extended support period was available only for enterprises customers, yet Microsoft expanded it for end-users as well only two months ago.

Vista is currently loaded on only 7.7 percent computers out there, and accounts for only 8.3 percent of machines running Windows.

The platform has been losing market share fast since the release of Windows 7, and is expected to experience an even steeper decrease in the next months.

The latest major update for Windows Vista arrived three years ago, in the form of Service Pack 2 (SP2).

While users will be able to continue taking advantage of Windows Vista and Office 2007 moving forth, they won’t be enjoying the same level of support coming from Microsoft.

According to Microsoft, customers should strongly consider the transition to a newer product. The obvious alternative to Windows Vista is Windows 7, while Office 2007 users are encouraged to upgrade to Office 2010.

Alternatively, people can wait a bit longer and move to the upcoming Windows 8, which is expected to become available in a final form sometime in October this year.