Microsoft hopes Windows 10 will bring users back and entice businesses to ditch the four-year-old Windows 7, seven-year-old Windows Vista and the now-discontinued 13-year-old Windows XP.
In other words, six-and-a-half years after it was officially replaced by Windows Vista, there are still some 500m computers running XP.
A year from now the company will cease all support for its ancient Windows XP operating system and Office 2003 software package, which remain installed on tens of millions of computers worldwide.
Despite Microsoft's constant reminders about the pending end of customer support, one in three computers used around the world today still relies on XP.
No matter how joined up your systems are, CIOs and IT managers up and down the country are lying awake at night worrying about the fact that Microsoft will no longer provide tech support for Windows XP from April.
But because of the continued use of Microsoft's long-outdated Windows XP in not-fully-updated versions, some installations of Internet Explorer 6 could be forced to use the outdated security protocol, giving a hacker access to traffic to and from a web server.Each of the four problems may seem particular, but they all stem from inattention.
With the launch of Windows XP, the latest version of its operating system, last month, it had already escaped the biggest immediate threat, that XP would have been dragged into the legal case and its launch delayed.
World chip demand still languishes.Software that allows the running of Java programs will not be included in Microsoft's new operating system, Windows XP, or its new browser, for "business reasons".
Even then, moving from XP to Windows 7 or Windows 8 is not the easiest of migrations.
And every time these later versions receive patches and updates, hackers bent on nefarious deeds will instantly check to see whether XP shares the same vulnerabilities.
It came too late for inclusion in Windows XP, but Microsoft recently announced that it will add Bluetooth support next year.
