Let’s talk about the Windows 8.1 discontinuation and all the things you should know about it. Windows 8 was released back in 2012, as an official successor of the Windows 7 operating system. After one year, in 2013, the Windows 8.1 came to the market as a free system upgrade, introducing quite a few quality-of-life fixes and new features. Now, the overall percentage of Win 8 computers is already quite low and the system as a product has lost most of its market share and user base rather quickly. Let’s get to the essence here – what does the end of Windows 8 mean for you as a user?
- Windows 8 official EOL date
- What happened with the end of Windows 8 support?
- Can you upgrade Windows 8.1 to Windows 10 for free?
- The conclusion – Windows 8 in 2023?
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Check out also: Windows XP Today – Your Questions Answered!
Windows 8 official EOL date
When will the Windows 8 be discontinued? Well, it already happened. On January 10 2023 the Windows 8 operating system has finally reached its end of life, and this has been officially announced by Microsoft.
While the OS still continues to work (just as it was with the Windows XP), there aren’t any system updates and security patches released anymore, and the customer service for the Win 8 as a product has been officially disabled.
All sub-distributions of Win 8, like the Windows 8.1 Embedded also got axed. This includes the extended support for the systems which was in effect from the year 2018 until the beginning on 2023.
After over 10 years of service, the Windows 8.1 OS alongside with Windows 8 have joined the ranks of Microsoft legacy operating systems. But what does it mean for you?
What happened with the end of Windows 8 support?
As we’ve mentioned, as of January 10 2023, Windows 8 stopped receiving updates and security patches, it’s no longer maintained and the Microsoft customer support for the product is now unavailable.
What this means, is that while you still are able to use Windows 8 after its discontinuation, your system’s safety is no longer ensured, even with additional antivirus software installed.
Remember that once an operating system finally stops receiving updates, it becomes vulnerable to all the system-level exploits that are being constantly developed by malicious actors.
When there are no new patches for the newly discovered vulnerabilities and malware targeting the latest version of the system, as days go by it becomes more and more risky to use it. The risks include all the dangers that have to do with regular cyber attacks: data loss, data theft, identity compromise and more.
Of course, if you were to use Windows 8/8.1 either in a virtual machine, or without connecting it to the internet or to any kind of computer network you will still be just fine provided you don’t supply the system with malicious files yourself.
You can read more about that in our neat article about the discontinuation and legacy of the classic Microsoft Windows XP OS.
Also, slowly but surely, software developers are ceasing to support Windows 8 and your new favorite software and app versions might become unavailable on the system as the time goes by. This is another thing to keep in mind.
In summary: Did Windows 8 and 8.1 stop working after January? – No. Has it become unsafe to use as the time goes forward? – Yes. Consider upgrading to either Windows 10 or 11 to ensure your data safety.
Can you upgrade Windows 8.1 to Windows 10 for free?
The most important question for all the current windows 8 and 8.1 users right now seems to be: can you do a free upgrade to Windows 10 or 11 in an easy way? Yes, at least for now, as long as you own a genuine activated copy of Windows 7 or windows 8 operating system, you can upgrade your OS to windows 10 for free.
How to do the upgrade? You’ll have to use the official Microsoft update tool that is available on their website. This little program will either act as an installer that will be able to upgrade your OS right away, or an install media creation tool that will aid you with creating a USB drive with a Windows installer on it depending on what you need.
If your older existing copy of Windows 8 was legit and already activated, the license should transfer automatically during the install. For now, this method still works, and the free upgrade through the official channels is perfectly possible.
The upgrade to Windows 11 is also possible, albeit only for W11 compatible machines – computers which hardware is deemed sufficient to run Windows 11.
The conclusion – Windows 8 in 2023?
To sum it all up, the support for Windows 8 has officially ended and there is not much that can be done about that. As of now, it is estimated that only about 2% of the world’s computers still make use of Windows 8 and in general it’s no longer beneficial to keep on using the system for anything other than offline use of legacy software no longer available on any other Microsoft Windows distributions, or simply for memories sake.
With that said, you really should upgrade to Win 10 or 11 if your main machine still uses an outdated version of Windows OS: check out the Windows keys from the official distribution in the Microsoft store over on Amazon!
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