Sale of consumer PCs with Windows 7 ends

Sales of PCs with Windows 7 end on Friday. This is according to information from Microsoft. This marks the end of retail sales of one of the most popular operating systems in computer history after five years.

The end of sales only applies to the consumer versions of Windows 7, such as Home Premium and Ultimate, according to the support page. The Professional version will remain available as an OEM version for at least another year, so manufacturers can still put it on PCs; Microsoft has not yet set an end date for that sale.

From Friday, therefore, shops will no longer be allowed to sell PCs with the consumer version of Windows 7; Microsoft prefers them to run Windows 8.1, the latest version of Microsoft’s operating system. Windows 7 went on sale on October 22, 2009 as a quick successor to Windows Vista, its poorly received predecessor by consumers. It is unknown how many licenses of Windows 7 Microsoft has sold, but it would be at least 600 million. With that, it still has to tolerate Windows XP, because Microsoft would have sold a billion licenses of it.