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Microsoft is warning customers that the end is soon coming for Windows 7 in much the same way it came for Windows XP earlier this year. The company will end free mainstream support for Windows 7 on January 13, 2015, but users will continue to get security updates till 2020. The move will mostly affect consumers. Businesses that pay for extended Windows 7 support, as most of them do, will be supported for another five years, until January 14, 2020. That's important, because many businesses are right now are in the process of upgrading their old Windows XP PCs, but they're moving to Windows 7, not Windows 8. There's some speculation that, given the popularity of Windows 7, Microsoft might change its mind as the date nears and continue to support it a bit longer, like it did for Windows XP. All told, Microsoft supported XP for about 13 years. That kind of extension doesn't seem likely at this point. Remember,  Windows 8  basically includes a full version

By Alexei Oreskovic SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google Inc will shut down its early social-networking service, Orkut , which was launched ten years ago but has failed to put Google ahead in what has become one of the Web's most popular businesses. Google said it will shut down Orkut, which is widely used in Brazil and India but hasn't caught on more broadly, on Sept. 30, to focus on its other social networking initiatives. The company declined to say how many users Orkut has. "Over the past decade, YouTube, Blogger and Google+ have taken off, with communities springing up in every corner of the world. Because the growth of these communities has outpaced Orkut's growth, we've decided to bid Orkut farewell," Google said in a post on the Orkut blog on Monday. Orkut was launched early in 2004, the same year that Facebook Inc, now the world's No.1 social network with 1.28 billion users, was founded. The service's shutdown comes as Google'