"Art Todesco" wrote

| When Windows 7 support ends, what are you all going to do? Pay for
| additional support? Or what?
|

There is no paid support. Nothing has changed
from past versions. If you're a corporate customer
with "enterprise" licensing, you can pay through
the nose for security updates. In other words,
if you're the British navy or General Motors, you
m,ight consider it cheaper to pay Microsoft extortion
rates to get patches rather than scrap thousands
of computers. For SOHo people there's no option.

If you pretend to be running a kiosk system you
*might* be able to get updates. That works in XP
by adding a Registry setting, but may not necessarily
work in 7.

There's also the possibility that MS will extend the
support of Win7, as they did with XP. That all depends
on how much pressure there is from corporate customers.
If most are still running 7, which seems to be the case
currently, MS may not want to risk the animosity of
dumping them. On the other hand, they've pushed 10
very hard. So I don't expect that even MS execs know
what will happen at this point. They're probably waiting
to see whether the threat makes companies switch to 10.

Someone mistakenly posted an article recently
about paid support, but they had misread the source
article. Or maybe they didn't. It was posted by one
of the local MS shills, so it may have been meant to
just be more propaganda trying to sell 10. There has
never been optional paid support beyond the final
support date for SOHo customers. Their intention is
to push old product off the cliff as quickly as is
feasible. Irraitional fear of security issues is one of
the few carrots Microsoft have to get people to buy
new computers.

Personally, I'm going to keep using XP as long
as I can and use 7 for testing software or going
to risky websites that require script. 7 is my
sacrificial lamb system. XP is what I use to get
things done.