Steam will prevent access to your games if you use Windows 7 in Jan 2024

[pibbuR]

Windows 7 has been out of support for 3 years, but you can update to windows 10 for free. Asking companies to support obsolete software costs millions. They can make laws however you want but there is a cost associated to those laws.

Yepp. So either they would have to require a maintenance fee or charge a higher price for the soctware.

Since health care software was mentioned, for all the systems I have seen, there is a maintenance fee (up to 20% of the list price per year, depending on the level of service the customer wants) which takes care of technical service and updates and sometimes upgrades.

pibbuR who most likely won't last 30 more years.

 

[Pladio]

Yepp. So either they would have to require a maintenance fee or charge a higher price for the soctware.

Since health care software was mentioned, for all the systems I have seen, there is a maintenance fee (up to 20% of the list price per year, depending on the level of service the customer wants) which takes care of technical service and updates and sometimes upgrades.

pibbuR who most likely won't last 30 more years.

Yup even companies like the one I work for spend a lot of money for the extended support of Microsoft.

So as you say, if the law was that Microsoft had to provide 30 years of support then every other windows version would need to cost a lot more.

It just isn't free to do this for the company. In the end someone has to pay and the government passing a law doesn't make that free.

 

[Dasale]

No way to delete a post? I only see Edit, then Save or Cancel.

 

[notdart]

Yup even companies like the one I work for spend a lot of money for the extended support of Microsoft.

So as you say, if the law was that Microsoft had to provide 30 years of support then every other windows version would need to cost a lot more.

It just isn't free to do this for the company. In the end someone has to pay and the government passing a law doesn't make that free.

I think my problem is how MS force things upon the consumer to fit their business model as well as being quite intrusive. I guess this is sort of tangent but relevant to some of the things being said in this thread. Yes windows 7 is dead and due to security issues really shouldn't be used. Yes window 10 is a bit intrusive and windows 11 worse esp as MS try to monetize the 'cloud' as they call it. We can argue that old intel hardware has security issue as well as some nicer feature of the new processor but forcing people to upgrade the hardware is a bit heavy handed (this is a different issue than the 'spying' as well as trying to trick people into using remote services);

Linux shows you what can be done (and it is free) and while some installation of linux can be intrusive (not as intrusive as windows) by default they are more transparent on the issue and make the hooks to turn that stuff off more readily available. Also Linux support a wide range of hardware 'better' though newer stuff takes longer to get added and proprietary hardware is usually not supported (usually odd wifi devices) due to lack of chip specs required to write drivers.

I have two computers - one for games which runs windows-10 (soon 11); and one for everything else which runs linux and if more games supported linux i'd drop windows all together.