FrankForum (Frankness IS Forum)

This just in from ZDnet, MSFT has announced it will no longer allow manufacturers to sell new Win7 machines.

Ironically, in Youtube I just posted updated selling results to follow up on the Four Big Lies series from the beginning of September. The vids were made 10/26/15 (not worth watching), and are in my Bye Bye Windows playlist (at the end of that playlist):

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1bv_xPIih3fF-5yaAHjiC34wC01-1Dnb

The very boring videos all show that Dell, HP and Lenovo are using DOWNGRADE RIGHTS from 8.1 to justify installing new Win7 preinstalled. As of today, Dell's customizable bus Latitudes usually only offer Win7 or 10, not 8.1, but the 7's are actually 8.1 licenses using the downgrade rights to justify using 7. So it seems like maybe they can scoot past the deadline, given the details in the ZDnet article?

So I was just at Dell, asking which of the Latitudes have soldered CPUs, so can avoid them. None have soldered CPUs. Then, which have batteries you cannot remove, as I want to avoid them also. The following have batteries you cannot remove:

Didn't have time to look up HP or Lenovo again. If you want to chime in, do!

Update, 11/07/15: Lenovo is still almost sold out in business laptops sporting Win7. Only one type left. HP is not sold out, but its website design is so bad, it's hard to tell. Its business laptops are 8.1 and prior, some are only Win7. Dell's Win7 selection is mostly Precision (top of the line) and a few large Latitudes (business workhorse machines, easy to change out the hard drive and easy to update to Win10).

They're already using downgrade rights to sell preinstalled Win7. Lenovo sold out its downgrade rights machines (using Win10 and I guess Win8) about three months ago, seems like one of my clients nabbed the last of the Thinkpads.

So maybe the selection won't last until next Halloween, among the big Three. (I don't know about Asus, Acer, etc.) The used machine market at delloutlet and dellauction.com should be pretty good even after next Halloween, and of course there is Ebay. But those machines won't be covered under warranty, so if you migrate to Win10 probably the updates can be pulled at any time, given the lifecycle agreement limits the lifetime of the support to the manufacturer's support, see the ** in the lifecycle agreement here (third yellow highlight): viewtopic.php?f=7&t=59&p=53#p73

Anything to avoid Windows 10 and its 'services' covered under hitlerian aka.ms/msa . Clearly the market isn't adopting Win10.

Businesses are still getting comfortable on the Windows 7 platform. Not to mention there are physical pieces of equipment which run on XP that are not easily migrated to newer versions of windows due to replacing the hardware being costly-- or the original software developers being dead or long gone from the company they programmed it for. Sure it's the fault of the business for not future proofing something.

But some Microsoft execs (pun not intended) are pushing updates too fast too soon.