Windows 7: EOL warning on January 15, 2020

[German]Microsoft has announced, that Users of Windows 7 SP1 from January 15, 2020 will receive a warning, which will be displayed on the entire screen. It notifies a user of the end of life of Windows 7 SP1. Here is some more information about this topic and which update or which program is responsible for it.

Windows 7 support expiration January 14, 2020

On January 14, 2020, Windows 7 SP1 reaches the end of support (End of Life) after 10 years of updates. In concrete terms, this means that machines will receive security updates for the last time on this date. The machines will still be useable, but become vulnerable due to missing security updates.

(Windows 7 EOL-Nag-Screen, Source: Bleeping Computer)

At the same time, about 27% of desktop systems are still running Windows 7, if you can believe various statistics services. Microsoft has therefore already started to announce the end of support for 2020 to users since April 2019. I had reported in the blog posts Windows 7 shows End of Support notification and Windows 7 Pro: Update KB4524752 display EOL notification.

In enterprise environments, however, there is the Extended Security Update Program (ESU). Uusers of Windows 10 Pro and Windows 10 Enterprise can order additional security updates for a fee for a further three years, until January 2023. I've already reported about this topic several times in this blog (see link list at the end of the article).

Full-screen notification as of January 15, 2020

I already mentioned it today in the blog post Patchday: Updates for Windows 7/8.1/Server (Dec. 10, 2019). Microsoft points out the following in the support posts for the Windows 7 security updates for December 2019.

Starting January 15, 2020, Windows 7 will display a full-screen end of support notification in Starter, Home Basic, Home Premium, Professional (without ESU license) and Ultimate. This must then be closed by the user.

According to Microsoft, this notification applies to the following Windows 7 SP1 operating system variants:

• Starter
• Home Basic
• Home Premium
• Professional (without ESU-License)
• Ultimate

With Windows 7 Professional, however, the display only appears if no ESU license for extended support is found on the Windows machine in question.

Microsoft's hint also answers a question that may be bothering some. Earlier announcements mentioned that Windows 10 Ultimate had also been included in the ESU program. This notice has largely disappeared from the Microsoft support pages since November 2019. Only in this FAQ about the end of Windows 7 support the staff from Redmond managed not yet to delete the reference to Windows 7 Ultimate ESU.

According to the Microsoft announcement in the support article, the display is displayed full screen. But the user can actively click this ad away and pretend that he no longer wants to see it.

This new version will display a full-screen alert on January 15th, 2020 recommending that you upgrade to Windows 10. This alert is shown over all open Windows, the desktop, and even the taskbar. pic.twitter.com/ABQMx6H9q3

— BleepingComputer (@BleepinComputer) December 11, 2019

The exciting question now was what exactly does it look like? The colleagues from Bleeping Computer showed a corresponding screenshot in the tweet above.

• The page contains the note that the machine has dropped out of support and is no longer receiving security updates, software updates or support.
• The user can click a button to get information about upgrading to Windows 10 or to be reminded later about the end of support. He can also use a hyperlink in the lower left corner to specify that he no longer wishes to receive a reminder.

Woody Leonhard also embedded the screenshot in this article. So you have to click away the notification so that there is no further nag screen. Afterwards Windows 7 SP1 can still be used. However, there will be security risk at some point with systems that are connected to the Internet. Enterprises who still depend on Windows 7 SP1 shall buy another year security updates via the ESU program – costs around 50 US $ for the first year. In my view, systems that are offline can be used without any problems. However, users need to choos another antivirus software, if your are using Microsoft Security Essentials (see my article Windows 7: Soon End-of-Life for Microsoft Security Essentials).

Rollup Update KB4530734 responsible for notification

Responsible is the file EOSnotify.exe, which can be found in the rollup update KB4530734 of December 10, 2019 (can be found in the file list of the update). MVP colleague Lawrence Abrams has published some technical details in this article. The program

%windir%\system32\EOSNotify.exe

is executed via two tasks called EOSNotify and EOSNotify2. After installing the rollup update KB4530734 of December 10, 2019, these tasks should be found in the task planner under Microsoft -> Windows -> Setup. Bleeping Computer has described the ability to suppress notification here. For the current user navigate via Registry Editor to the key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\EOSNotify

Add the DWORD value (32 bit) DiscontinueEOS and set it to 1. That's all you need to do, to suppress the notification.

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