More than 245,000 cases of COVID-19 have been reported globally so far, and over 10,000 people have died. Many governments around the world are responding by ordering businesses to close and people to stay at home as much possible. And that’s leading tech companies to take unusual steps.

Netflix, Amazon, and YouTube have agreed to lower the bit rates for their video streaming services in Europe in order to reduce network congestion.

And Microsoft has announced it’s extending the lifespan of Windows 10 version 1709 by an extra six months — for enterprise and education customers, anyway. Support for the home version already ended a few months ago.

Unlike earlier versions of Windows, which were updated periodically with service packs and eventually replaced with a new version of Windows, Microsoft’s Windows 10 is on more of a rolling release schedule, with two big updates released each year.

If you don’t want to update twice a year, you can delay upgrading… for a while. Microsoft continues to support older versions of Windows 10 for 18 months for consumers, and 30 months for enterprise and education customers who may want to be a little more conservative with their update schedules.

Support for Windows 10 version 1709 Enterprise, Education, and IoT Enterprise editions had been scheduled to end in April. But at a time when the coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic continues to spread and many people are responding by working remotely if at all, it might not be the best time to force people to upgrade an operating system or risk losing support.

So the company is offering another six months of security updates.

That means the revised timeline for Windows 10 version 1709 looks like this:

  • Oct 17, 2017 – initial release
  • April 9, 2019 – end of support for Home and Pro editions
  • April 14, 2020 – planned end of support for Enterprise and Education editions
  • Oct 13, 2020 – new end of service for Enterprise and Education editions

via ZDNet

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