End of an Era: Windows Vista Comes to an End

April 11, 2017, is the last day of Windows Vista. After this day, Windows Vista will not get any new updates – including security updates, non-security hotfixes, free or paid assisted support options, or online technical content updates – from Microsoft.

“Microsoft has provided support for Windows Vista for the past 10 years, but the time has come for us, along with our hardware and software partners, to invest our resources towards more recent technologies so that we can continue to deliver great new experiences,” the company wrote on the support page for Windows Vista.

If you are still running Vista, you must upgrade to the latest version of Windows, because it won’t get any more updates. Microsoft warns that “PCs running Windows Vista will not be secure and will still be at risk for virus and malware.”

Windows Vista wasn’t well received, but it did change the future of Windows 10, because it made some fundamental changes to the operating system that are still alive today. However, Vista is known more for its missteps by the company than for its advancements. Some failed features of Windows Vista include the Aero Glass interface, the Windows Future Storage (WinFS) filesystem, inclusion of DRM for Blu-ray disks, and excessive User Account Control (UAC) prompts, to name a few.

Some of the graphics-intense features made Vista a resource hog and incompatible with older hardware. It ran extremely slow on the machines that came with Vista pre-installed. All of this gave the operating system, which was one of the most ambitious Microsoft projects, a bad name.