This week, Microsoft finally stopped its support for the Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and has suggested its users to now switch on it Windows 7 or rather upgrade to new version of Vista.


There are two sorts of Vista Service Packs, one whose support was taken aback on Tuesday and the other one whose support would be provided by Microsoft till April 10, 2012 and many even provide limited “extended support” till April 11, 2017. Thus, as soon as the support for any particular service pack is stopped, the software doesn’t receive any form of security updates.


In the Windows Team Blog, the company has stated, “We recommend folks look at upgrading to Windows 7, which is the fastest selling operating system in history, selling over 400 million licenses to-date. Windows Vista users can also use Windows Update to update their PC to the latest service pack available which is Service Pack 2 (SP2).”
The end-of-support dates for the service packs are published by Microsoft so that the users might know about it days and months in advance.


Nonetheless, if you don’t have a brand new software, that doesn’t mean you have to buy a new system. Any machine having Vista can upgrade to a higher version of Vista which is the second Service Pack for free. Many of the Vista machines have hardware that is required for the up gradation to Windows 7. In fact, from this week onwards, the PC’s which already have Windows 7 will be able to upgrade to Windows 8, according to Microsoft.


As Vista didn’t gain as much popularity as Windows XP, the real problem lies for the XP users. The support for XP 2 had already ended in 2010 and extended support for XP 3 is also likely to end by April 8, 2014. In accordance to the statement issued by Microsoft, the sale of PC having XP ended in 2010 and the sale of the entire PC’s having Vista will be stopped by the end of October, 2011.


Microsoft has already released two previews of Windows 8 and has given sufficient signals of its launch. Windows 8 is expected to release in 2012. Yet, they haven’t put forth a word about the support that they will extend to Windows 7.