You have less than a year left to buy a new Windows 7 PC
As positive as the reception has been for Microsoft's new Windows 10 - generally speaking - lots and lots of people still love Windows 7, the PC operating system first released in October 2009.
Believe it or not, you could actually still buy a PC with Windows 7 pre-installed.
But those devices are about to get a lot harder to find. According to a new chart on an official Microsoft website, there won't be any new shipments of PCs with Windows 7 Professional pre-installed after October 31 next year, signaling the operating system's ongoing march to the grave.
Take a look:
This doesn't mean you won't be able to buy a Windows 7 PC at all after that date, as noted by ZDNet's Ed Bott - it just means that stores like Best Buy are selling their final inventory of Windows 7 computers, and they'll vanish fast as reserves run out.
Meanwhile, Windows 7 is still the most-used PC operating system in the world, and there are plenty of copies out there in the wild, even though Microsoft has officially stopped shipping copies to stores. So if you were really dedicated, you could buy a new copy and install it on any other PC.
Just note that Windows 7 hit the end of its official support period in January 2015, meaning that there won't be any new features. It will continue to get security updates until mid-2020, but Microsoft is focusing the bulk of its engineering efforts on Windows 10 at this point.
Also noteworthy from that chart is that Microsoft is cutting off PC sales for Windows 8 on June 30th, 2016, a full four months before Windows 7's deadline. That's weird, but not surprising. Even though Windows 7 was released earlier, Windows 8 had a bunch of problems that kept it from catching on in the same way.