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  • No More Support for Microsoft's Vista
Technology Articles > Software > Security & Privacy > No More Support for Microsoft's Vista

Microsoft is officially cutting off all support for Windows Vista. Vista was never really the popular kid in the Microsoft sandbox anyway, but some people are still hanging onto it. If you’re one of those people, stop. Stop now. Update.

Yesterday, all support for Vista ended. No more bug fixes. No more help from Microsoft. Nothing. So how do you go about upgrading and why should you? Here’s more on that note. Let’s start with why upgrades are important.

When Hacks Attack

Updates can be annoying. Company blogs post about updates and lack of support. Or, you may have been plagued by an update pop-up that regularly haunts your startup screen. Either way, making the effort to update is just plain irritating. You have to choose a day and time to update. But more than that, you have to stop using your computer in order to let the update run (and then restart).

Despite the irritating quality of updating, there’s a really good reason to do so. That reason is called hacking. You see, hackers wait for OS updates to cease. They wait for moments like these. Why? Because they then search for any vulnerability for the simple reason that they know no help is coming - it’s like your computer is stranded on an island and no rescue team is in sight.

It’s easy and you’re a sitting duck.

How to Upgrade

So now that you know why you should upgrade, let’s talk about how to do it. Microsoft has some requirements that include 1GB of RAM, 20GB of free disk space, and a 1GHz processor. That stuff is pretty standard so you should be good. Next you’ll need to actually get the upgrade. To do this, look in your system tray for the ‘Get Windows 10’ update.

Once you are notified that your version of Windows 10 is ready, just run the installation. After that, follow the prompts to set up your new OS. Really, the whole thing shouldn’t take more than one hour to complete. But, again, you really do want to upgrade from Vista. Most Microsoft users that did have Vista have already upgraded given that Vista wasn’t overly popular.

A Long time to Roll Out

Microsoft took its time ceasing support for Vista and updating users. Microsoft recently noted that Vista’s market share was less than 1%, which means that most people aren’t really using Vista anyway. But some people were still holding onto the OS (by the way Windows 7 is the most popular OS on the planet, which is interesting).

You can go rogue and run Vista if you love it. I do not recommend doing so for the hacker reasons listed above, but you can. Just keep in mind that running Vista now means that you are running it with zero support. So if you do get hacked, there’s probably nothing that you can do other than comply with the hackers.

This is, of course, less than ideal because your system can be compromised. Do yourself a favor and upgrade to Windows 10. The whole process should be painless enough, but it will save you a lot of headaches in the near future.