Sales of consumer PCs with Windows 7 to stop

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

The end of sale 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 set an end date for that sale yet.

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