Microsoft again pushes back end of support for Skylake devices on Windows 7 and 8.1

Microsoft today announced that it is again delaying the end of support for Windows 7 and 8.1 devices running sixth generation Intel (Skylake) chips.

In January, Microsoft said support for those Windows operating systems would end on July 17, 2017. Then, in March, Microsoft pushed back the end date to July 17, 2018.

Today, Microsoft is pushing back the end date for Windows 7 by a year and a half — January 14, 2020, is last day now — and for Windows 8.1 by four and a half years — till January 14, 2023. This also applies to Windows Embedded 7, 8, and 8.1.

“Enterprise customers are moving to Windows 10 faster than any version of Windows. At the same time, we recognize that, in some instances, customers have a few systems that require longer deployment timeframes. We listened to this feedback and today are sharing an update to our 6th Gen Intel Core (Skylake) support policy,” Microsoft director of Windows business planning Shad Larsen wrote in a blog post.

The announcement comes a few weeks after Microsoft admitted that it would not attain its goal of getting Windows 10 onto 1 billion devices within two to three years of its launch last summer. The most recent statistic out of Redmond is that Windows 10 has now been installed on more than 350 million devices.

As Microsoft has said before, Larsen noted that future chips, including the seventh-generation Kaby Lake processors and AMD’s seventh-generation Bristol Ridge processors, will only be supported on Windows 10, not earlier versions of Windows.

The list of supported Skylake devices is here.