Microsoft stops selling Windows 7 As of 31 October 2014, Microsoft will no longer provide licences for Windows 7 Home Basic, Windows 7 Home Premium, and Windows 7 Ultimate to PC makers - like Dell, Lenovo and HP. Microsoft has also stopped selling boxed retail copies of Windows 8, which launched in 2012. However, the operating system will still be sold pre-installed on some Windows PCs. In pictures: Microsoft Windows through the years Windows 7 currently accounts for 53 per cent of the desktop operating system market, up from 47 per cent this time last year, according to the latest figures from Net Applications. Windows XP now accounts for 17 per cent (compared to 31 per cent last year), while Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 together account for 17 per cent (compared to 9 per cent last year). Windows as a whole accounts for over 90 per cent of the desktop operating system market, compared to around 7 per cent for Apple's Mac OS X operating system, and around 1.5 per cent for Linux. The next version of Windows, called Windows 10, is due to be released in the middle of next year.