Microsoft is ending OneDrive support for many older Windows PCs

OneDrive will stop supporting many PCs running the old version of Windows starting early next year, Microsoft has announced on its blog. Changes will have an impact on Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 on personal computers, the company said, although termination will take place in two phases, with the first kick on January 1.

Starting January 1, 2022, Microsoft will no longer produce onedrive updates for desktop platform cloud applications on personal computers. However, desktop applications for business will shift to “live Windows support,” which means Windows 7 and 8.1 engines will be fine until early 2023 (Windows 8 support ends in 2016.)

Quick forward a few months after the change and Microsoft say users who continue to run one of the old versions of this old Windows on a personal computer will no longer be able to synchronize their files with OneDrive using a desktop application. The change will arrive on March 1, 2022, forcing users to upload their files to Cloud using OneDrive through a web browser.

This change, Microsoft explained, would enable the company to “focus resources on new technology and operating systems,” and help make users stay safe. The company recently made Windows 11 available for users, despite its controversial launch due to the minimum TPM 2.0 specification requirements. Microsoft addresses this by publishing documents that explain how to activate TPM 2.0 on a PC, although not every computer supports it.

This onedrive change will especially have an impact on users who still use Windows on longer hardware – if the model is more than five years old, there is a good chance that does not support Windows 11 minimum requirements, although making a jump to Windows 10 remain an option. .