You may or may not have heard that Microsoft are issuing a large security update for Windows today. It seems to be quite a significant one – even the BBC website has covered the story.
Certainly if you allow Windows to automatically update itself (and you really should make sure you get the benefit of these fixes), it may already have started whirring away and doing its thing.
Something that you may be less aware of is that Microsoft will no longer be supporting Windows 98 or Windows ME from the 11th of July this year – just under one month from today.
There is a page on the Microsoft website here about the change.
What does this mean? Well, it means that if you have Windows 98 or Windows Me installed on your computer and your computer goes wrong, Microsoft won’t help you. In fact, because Microsoft won’t help you, you may find other companies won’t help you either. Ultimately, if that third party company can’t fix it and would normally need to go back to Microsoft for help and advice, Microsoft will say no. So, inevitably, you could find yourself stranded.
Of course, your Windows 98 machine isn’t suddenly going to stop working. They won’t all shut down on 11th July just because Microsoft say they won’t support that operating system anymore.
However, our Tuesday tip today, is a simple one and we say this very sensitively knowing that we are talking about significant sums of money and, in some cases, machines to which people may feel very attached. Our Tuesday tip is this – is it time to upgrade your computer?
We will be testing Visual Liturgy Live on Windows 98 and Windows Me and building the software in such a way that it should work on those platforms. However, Microsoft’s withdrawal of support puts us in an awkward position for Visual Liturgy Live and the versions that already exist. We won’t be able to support those platforms and so will be having to draw the line for minimum requirements as Windows 2000/XP.
The full minimum requirements for Visual Liturgy Live will be published in due course but for the moment, we thought it would be important to draw your attention to what Microsoft are doing so you can make informed decisions.