It’s curtains for Windows 7 PCs from OEMs come October 2016

Within the next one year, all PCs will have Windows 10 pre-installed.

Microsoft has at last set a hard deadline on the time which Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) can sell PCs with Windows 7 preinstalled, and that deadline is 31st October, 2016.

This means that by next November, there will not be any PCs with Windows 7 Professional on-board on sale. ZDNet spotted the fact that Microsoft had recently updated its Windows Lifecycle Fact Sheet page with this new information.

Although Microsoft ended OEM sales of Personal Computers with Windows 7 Ultimate and Home back in October 2014, the company continued to allow vendors of Personal Computers to pre-install Windows 7 Professional due to the poor reception Windows 8 received.

Redmond felt it could not force users into Windows 8, however now that Windows 10 has been released and that Operating System has received overwhelmingly positive reception from users, the time has evidently come for PC users to wave goodbye to pre-installed Windows 7 for good.

Windows as a Service

Windows 8.1 will also be banned from OEM machines as of 31st October 2016, hence from that point on, all Personal Computers will be sold with Windows 10 preinstalled (and possibly for some time into the future, if the promises made by Microsoft about Windows as a Service are true going forward).

So if you do not want any part of new desktop OSs offered by Microsoft and would rather stick with the good old Windows 7 Professional, you should ensure that you order your new personal computer within next year.

However, according to recent data released by Stat Counter, many people are happily making the shift to Windows 10, which now holds a 9% share of the desktop OS market. It is catching up with Windows 8 & Windows 8.1 that is on 13%, in spite of the fact that the growth rate of Windows 10 did slow down a little in October according to the bean counting firm.