Bad news for those of you who, for some reason, need to purchase Windows 7 from your local retailer. Microsoft has quietly discontinued the sale of the operating system as of October 30th of this year. You still have one year – October 30th 2014 – to purchase a desktop or laptop with Windows 7 pre-installed before Windows 7 fades away forever.

Microsoft launched Windows 8.1 on October 17th of 2013, nearly a year after Windows 8 was released. With Windows 7 set to reach its “end of sales” date on October 30th of 2014, now is the time to think about moving up to Windows 8 if you haven’t already done so – or snag up a copy of Windows 7 before it reaches its end of sales. 

“End of sales refers to the date when a particular version of Windows is no longer shipped to retailers or Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs). Examples of OEMs are Dell and Toshiba – PC manufacturers who often preinstall Windows software. When a version of Windows reaches its end of sales date, it’s a good time to think about upgrading,” Microsoft explains.

So while Microsoft has already stopped selling Windows 7 retail boxes, many retail outlets such as Amazon and Newegg continue to sell it. And once the “end of sales” date passes, don’t be surprised if you still see retail outlets selling Windows 7-powered PCs.

It’s hard to believe that the Windows 7 era has already ended as it feels like just yesterday we were tinkering around with a Beta build. Windows 7 SP1 will continue to receive support from Microsoft in the form of security updates up until January of 2015 (mainstream support) and January 2020 (extended support).

Update: It appears that Microsoft has changed the end of sales life. The Windows lifecycle website now shows Windows 7 end of sales as “to be determined.” Read more about it here.

Update 2: Microsoft has confirmed the October 30th end of sales life for Windows 7 – but has not provided a clear date on when the sales of PCs would end. “We apologize for any confusion this may have caused our customers. We’ll have more details to share about the Windows 7 lifecycle once they become available. Additionally, we are confirming that the Retail software end of sales date for Windows 7 did happen on October 30, 2013,” a Microsoft spokesperson stated.

Microsoft is starting to sound very much like our evening TV lineup. The company sports a ‘Digital Crimes Unit’, after all. While it all may sound very CSI-like, the division is actually responsible for quite a lot of policing of the internet. Botnets are a very real threat, even more so to casual users who aren’t aware of what to look for when visiting sites, downloading free software and clicking on links and files within email.

Today, the Microsft arm-of-the-law struck again, this time disrupting “a rampant botnet in collaboration with Europol’s European Cybercrime Centrer (EC3), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and leaders in the technology industry, including A10 Networks Inc”. The Sirefef botnet, which goes by the more common name of ZeroAccess, has been a threat to the online community by targeting search results from Bing, Google and Yahoo. The criminal enterprise has pilfered an estimated $2.7 million each month. In the process more that two million computers of unsuspecting users have been infected.

Microsoft promises that “today’s action is expected to significantly disrupt the botnet’s operation, increasing the cost and risk for cybercriminals to continue doing business and preventing victims’ computers from committing fraudulent schemes”. The software giant is quick to point out that this was one the most robust threats online today. ZeroAcces relied on peer-to-peer infrastructure that provided easy access for cybercrimminals to gain remote access to the compromised computers.

“ZeroAccess is used to commit a slew of crimes, including search hijacking, which ‘hijacks’ people’s search results and redirects people to sites they had not intended or requested to go to in order to steal the money generated by their ad clicks. ZeroAccess also commits click fraud, which occurs when advertisers pay for clicks that are not the result of legitimate, interested human users’ clicks, but are the result of automated Web traffic and other criminal activity”, the company states.

Microsoft has now filed a civil suit against the operators of ZeroAccess in US District Court, asking for the blockage of communications between US-based computers and the 18 identified IP addresses being used. The company is, understandably, thumping its chest a bit here, but the FBI seems to be with them in the celebration. “If the hacker community has not yet taken notice, today’s disruption of the ZeroAccess botnet is another example of the power of public-private partnerships,” FBI Executive Assistant Director Richard McFeely said.

Just last week, we were introduced to a video from Microsoft that blatantly bashes the Google Chromebook. In essence, the video touts the Chromebook as being a brick and not a real laptop. Today, we’ve stumbled upon an unlisted video on the company’s official YouTube channel which features Ben the PC Guy walking the streets of Venice, California, with a Google Chromebook. Uh-oh!

“Google says its everything you need in one laptop, we’re going to show it to some real people and see if that’s really the case,” Microsoft’s Ben Rudolph stated in the video. Throughout the video, Ben downplays the features of the Google Chromebook by mentioning facts like “Chromebook doesn’t run Photoshop” and “Word, Excel, PowerPoint – cant install on this one.” One “real person” even stated that the Chromebook “wasn’t practical.”

“I don’t think theres anything I need in that laptop,” says one woman in the video about the Chromebook. Overall, the tone of the video is anti-Chromebook. Ben eventually showcases a Windows laptop/tablet and touts its features and price point, along with the ability to be productive. Forget Chromebook, everything you need in one laptop – well – that would be a Windows 8 laptop.

We’ve embedded the video below for your viewing pleasure. Check it out and let us know what you think – before the video gets pulled!

The month of November has come to a close and new data from NetApplications has been released giving us an idea of how well Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser is doing in terms of market share. Internet Explorer, in its entirety, commands the browser market for the month of November with a 58.36% share. Mozilla’s Firefox comes in second place with a 18.54% share, while Google’s Chrome rounds out the top three with a 15.44% share.

Internet Explorer 8 continues to be the top Internet Explorer browser with a 21.74% share, slightly down from the previous month’s 21.76%. Internet Explorer 10 snags a 17.50% share and comes in second place. Internet Explorer 9 drops to 9.25%. The browser that shipped with Windows XP back in 2001, Internet Explorer 6, still holds a 4.92% share.

Internet Explorer 11, Microsoft’s latest browser, owns a 3.27% share as of November 2013. This is up from the previous month’s 1.31% share. Microsoft made available the Windows 7 version of the browser, which helped increase the market share.

Microsoft claims that Internet Explorer 11 makes the web 40% more secure just by using the browser. “Internet Explorer 11 is the first browser to make Internet connections more secure and reliable by reducing the use of vulnerable ciphersuites, such as RC4 and by using the latest security standards, TLS 1.2, by default,” the IE team claims. 

Which browser do you use?

Customers still on Windows XP, and there are many thanks to corporate IT departments, have a number of reasons to be concerned. The biggest of which is that the operating system is scheduled to die this coming April. No, it won’t suddenly stop working, you’ll still be able to boot up your computer and continue on your merry way, but Microsoft will no longer support it. That’s important, because it means that bugs and security flaws will not be patched.

Now Microsoft is warning of one of those flaws, in the form of a new zero day vulnerability in the vintage OS. Advisory 2914486 states that the company “is investigating new reports of a vulnerability in a kernel component of Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. We are aware of limited, targeted attacks that attempt to exploit this vulnerability.” The software giant does promise that this bug does not affect newer versions of Windows, only those on XP and Server 2003 have reason for concern.

Security researchers at Sophos explain the problem as a “bug is in the NDPROXY.SYS driver, which co-ordinates the operation of Microsoft’s Telephony API (TAPI).” The researchers go on to announce that instances have been found in the wild. Sophos also claims that, due to the nature of the exploit, it presents a rather tough problem, when it comes to finding a solution. That’s never what you wish to hear, especially if you have hundreds of these systems deployed in your business.

At the moment, there is no solution for the problem. The company states only that “upon completion of this investigation, Microsoft will take the appropriate action to help protect our customers. This may include providing a security update through our monthly release process or providing an out-of-cycle security update, depending on customer needs.” In other words, all Microsoft can really do right now is tell customers to stay calm and hope for the best.

Microsofts’s Executive Vice President of Devices and Studios, Julie Larson-Green, has strongly hinted that Windows RT could be disappearing from the Windows line-up at some point in the future. IN a Q&A session at the UBS Global Technology Summit earlier in the week, Larson-Green was asked about the initial launch of Surface and the confusion that the existence of Windows RT caused.

Hear the word Windows and you probably immediately think of the desktop version of Windows 8.1 — it’s easy to forget that Windows RT exists, and Windows Phone is usually thought of as being an entirely separate entity. At Microsoft, these are seen as three branches from the same tree, but it is fair to say that there has been some confusion about the difference between Windows 8.1 and Windows RT 8.1.

In the Q&A session, Larson-Green agreed that both consumers and suppliers had been confused by the two variants of Windows 8, going on to say that the aim with Windows RT was to create a “closed, turnkey experience” much like Apple has done with iOS. Explaining the reason for the two different branches of Windows, Larson-Green said that the aim was to create one system that delivered the full power of a PC, and another that provided the simplicity of a tablet.

She did admit that the goal had not been explained “super-well” and said that more could have been done to differentiate between the two. She also went as far as saying that Windows RT “doesn’t have all the flexibility of Windows”. But what she says next is particularly interesting.

“We have the Windows Phone OS. We have Windows RT and we have full Windows. We’re not going to have three. We do think there’s a world where there is a more mobile operating system that doesn’t have the risks to battery life, or the risks to security. But, it also comes at the cost of flexibility. So we believe in that vision and that direction and we’re continuing down that path.”

So what is meant by those six little word “we’re not going to have three”?

There are a few options open to Microsoft here. Windows Phone and RT could be merged into a single mobile platform, Windows RT could be renamed so as not to include the Windows name and hopefully eliminate confusion, or Windows RT could just be completely dropped.

Which route do you think makes the most sense? Was Windows RT badly thought out? Can Microsoft rescue the platform and make it a success?