Microsoft will charge a new annual fee that doubles each year for Windows 7 updates

Wait, before you get your pitchforks out, Windows 7 is in its end of life period, it was released 9 years ago. Mainstream support ended on January 13, 2015 and the end of the extended support is January 14, 2020.

If you are a consumer the support will end then no matter what you do, so you won’t incur any fees, you just wont get any updates.

For business users though, a leak has revealed that Microsoft will extend support for a hefty fee.

If you are running Windows 7 Pro you will incur $50/per device for the first year, this will then double for the second year, and continue to double for each year thereafter.

For Windows Enterprise users that fee will be halved. So $25/device for the first year.

If you decide to skip the first year then get updates the following year in an attempt to save some money, you are out of luck. You will be charged from the end of the service date. So $150/$75 per device if you jump in on year two.

Now, this will no doubt raise a lot of shackles, but let’s not forget a couple of years ago the issues that occurred with Windows XP. Many organisations refused to upgrade, the NHS being a notable example. Then some happy go lucky hacker (or North Korea) took an exploit kindly the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), tweaked it for his/her liking and developed WannaCry.

The attack was estimated to have affected more than 200,000 computers across 150 countries, with total damages ranging from hundreds of millions to billions of dollars. For the NHS up to 70,000 devices – including computers, MRI scanners, blood-storage refrigerators and theatre equipment – may have been affected.

Extended support for Windows XP officially ended in 2014, that’s five years after the official end of support in 2009.

So it appears the Microsoft is taking a bit more of an aggressive strategy to ensure that companies don’t continue to use Windows 7 well beyond its support life.