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Microsoft is once again trying to bump the 10 per cent market share of people and businesses still lumbered with the company's unloved Windows Vista over to its latest operating system.

The software vendor's Brandon LeBlanc reminded customers in a terse blog post that support for Vista Service Pack 1 ended yesterday. Cue the sales pitch to get more people to upgrade to Windows 7, Microsoft's current OS.

That's despite the fact that the company is yet to announce end-of-the-line support for Vista Service Pack 2.

"We recommend folks look at upgrading to Windows 7, which is the fastest selling operating system in history, selling over 400 million licences to date," wrote LeBlanc.

"Windows Vista users can also use Windows Update to update their PC to the latest service pack available which is Service Pack 2 (SP2)."

Earlier this week, Microsoft warned customers still using its aged but well-liked operating system Windows XP that support for that product would be killed in about 1,000 days. In other words, the old workhorse still has about two years and nine months left in its increasingly impressive lifespan.

Currently, Windows XP remains the daddy of operating systems. It retains the biggest market share title ahead of its offspring, Windows 7.

According to the latest stats from market-watcher Net Applications, XP's share stood at 52 per cent over the last quarter of this year. Windows 7 held 26 per cent, and Vista was hovering around the 10 per cent mark.

That means a surprising number of customers and businesses are still saddled with Vista on their computers. Of course, like XP before it, Vista finally started to perform better with the introduction of SP2.

However, because significantly fewer people are running the OS on their computers today, we think its a fair bet that Vista support for all versions will end before XP finally expires in 2014. ®

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