Windows 7 no longer supported

[tommo III]

Got this unwelcome message yesterday when trying to update an exisitng file:

"Microsoft Word Starter 2010 cannot be opened. Try again or repair the product in Control Panel".

Same message if I tried to open an Excel spreadsheet.

Okay, thought I. Had this back in 2017.

Go to Control Panel; Programs; Programs and Features.  Find "Starter 2010" in the list. Click and out of the menu Organise/Uninstall/Change, click on Change which opens a window. Then click on Repair and follow some simple prompts from there.

No joy this time, was referred to Microsoft Product Support.

Initiated on-line chat and the cheeky beggers claimed to "have an answer" but required me to pay a fiver for the privilege !

Delved deeper on another website and came across this message:

"Microsoft have discontinued Windows 7 Support". 

For a conversion to Windows 10 a figure of £199.99 was quoted !

Fortunately I had already provisioned against this by a) investing in another laptop (a cheapo Chinese effort) which has Windows 10 and b) copying most of my files over to it.

But I thought I'd post this in case anyone else has found similar and is scratching their head over it ...

tommo

[Sav]

Windows 11 promises to be a bigger problem as well in that many PC's will be rejected by the upgrade as below spec. (including my expensive beast) as the processor must be recent and compatible.

There is a complicated workaround but i'm waiting to see what develops as I'm not preared to buy a new PC for Microsoft's comvenience or follow a complicated procedure and risk losing the lot.  Windows 10 will be supported for a while yet

[tommo III]

If it's any consolation, Sav (I know that you and KP were on XP and swore by it) Margo's laptop is still going fine on XP and it's that I've always turned to if I needed to print a spreadsheet as my Windows 7 could not get supplied with Drivers to link with my expensive Brother printer: XP could simply override any Microsoft 2010 warning and coercive messages.

I've decided to live without Word and Excel from now on as Google sheets provide me with anything I need to maintain my 3 websites - all for free !

It's like revisiting the early 90's when Word for Windows and XL replaced Lotus 1-2-3 and my oldfangled computer was dragged out of the office with me screaming and kicking, attaching myself to a leg of its stand !