October 31, 2014 marks the End of Sales date for Microsoft Windows 7 Home Basic, Home Premium, and Ultimate. End of sales refers to the date when a particular version of Windows is no longer shipped to retailers or Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs). Examples of OEMS are Dell and Toshiba—PC manufacturers who often preinstall Windows software.

This means that Microsoft will no longer offer retailers the ability to buy and sell new copies of Windows 7 and the operating system will no longer be offered pre-installed on new computers. This also means customers will no longer be able to order custom built computers with Windows 7 pre-installed or purchase new copies of Windows 7. When a version of Windows reaches its end of sales date, it’s probably a good time to think about upgrading to a newer version of Windows.

This deadline does not mean you will no longer find computers with Windows 7 pre-installed on them, and copies of Windows 7 available for purchase at big-box computer stores. Retailers already have a stock of computers that have Windows 7 pre-installed on them and will continue to sell the existing stock they have. However there are now a limited supply of these computers since manufacturers and retails can no longer order new computer with Windows 7 pre-installed.

Windows 7 Professional will not be affected by this date, as Microsoft has not yet specified a date to end of sales the operating system software. Institutions, corporations and businesses have been leery to make the switch to Windows 8 and have relied on Windows 7 as there have been too many bugs that needed to be fixed before the OS is ready to be a reliable business computing platform.

If you think that you may be running a version of Windows 7 that has reached the End of Sales date Microsoft urges you to start thinking about upgrading. However, realistically, you probably do not need to do anything at this point to your existing computer. You probably will not have to upgrade as the end of main stream support date for Windows 7 does not come until January 14, 2020.