Vista Post Mortem

Newbie here, love Vista which I just reacquainted myself with after installing new hard drive. Don't plan to upgrade to W7 after installing all the Vista updates. Much more stable, and a lot prettier than W7. My question is, when MS stops supporting Vista in three years, can I still use it if I have a great AV? I use Kaspersky Pure, have it running now. I have seen posts which say yes, just wondering what the experts here think (I'm definitely not an expert). Thank You.

You will be able to use Vista after support ends. But security will be a problem. Microsoft and AV suppliers have warned that the value of an AV product is much reduced on an unsupported OS. Malware has become very sophisticated in recent years and there is doubt about how effective AV software really is. In 3 years that situation is likely to be much worse.

Thanks for the reply. I'm getting the sense that the first line of defence is the OS patches and updates, and AV is just an extra layer of protection. Well, there is an opportunity then, it would seem to me, for Kaspersky and the rest to develop products that would remedy that. If that is even possible. Butwouldn't it be great if you could just keep the OS you love, and continue using it as long as you like? I know, everything changes, get used to it...

LMiller7 said:

You will be able to use Vista after support ends. But security will be a problem. Microsoft and AV suppliers have warned that the value of an AV product is much reduced on an unsupported OS. Malware has become very sophisticated in recent years and there is doubt about how effective AV software really is. In 3 years that situation is likely to be much worse.

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Well, there is an opportunity then, it would seem to me, for Kaspersky and the rest to develop products that would remedy that.

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That would be very difficult and expensive. You can't fix Windows security vulnerabilities with third party software. To do that you need to go to the root of the problem, the Windows files themselves. That would require access to the Windows source code and that is strictly controlled by Microsoft. Only the largest AV suppliers would have the resources to take on the role of suppling patches to Windows and I don't think they would wish to. It is not economically viable.