Tuesday 19 March 2013
As Microsoft marches toward its early April 2013 end-of-free-support deadline for Windows 7, the company is planning to update automatically some of those who still have yet to install the first (and seemingly only) Service Pack for the operating system.
As announced yesterday on the Microsoft "Blogging Windows" blog, Microsoft plans to begin rolling out Windows 7 SP1 automatically, via Windows Update to Windows 7 users who still are running the release-to-manufacturing (RTM) version without SP1 installed. This process will begin on March 19.
Windows 7 RTM, with no service pack installed, will no longer be supported as of April 9, according to a February 14 post on the Microsoft Springboard Series blog. Support for specific Windows releases ends 24 months after the release of a new Service Pack, and Windows 7 SP1 was released in February 2011.
Microsoft made available last week a Windows 7 hot-fix rollup that includes 90 previously released hot fixes. It's not SP2 for Windows 7, but it's pretty close.
