Microsoft Is Ending OneDrive Support For Many Older Windows PCs

OneDrive will stop supporting many PCs running older versions of Windows starting early next year, Microsoft has announced on its blog. The change will impact Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 on personal computers, the company says, though the discontinuation will take place in two phases, with the first kicking off on January 1.

Starting January 1, 2022, Microsoft will no longer produce OneDrive updates for the cloud platform's desktop apps on personal computers. However, the desktop application for business will be shifted to "the Windows support lifecycle," meaning Windows 7 and 8.1 machines will be fine until early 2023 (Windows 8 support ended back in 2016.)

Fast-forward a couple of months after that change and Microsoft says users who continue to run one of these older versions of Windows on personal computers will no longer be able to sync their files with OneDrive using the desktop application. That change will arrive on March 1, 2022, forcing users to instead upload their files to the cloud using OneDrive via a web browser.

This change, Microsoft explains, will allow the company to "focus resources on new technologies and operating systems," as well as helping keep users secure. The company recently made Windows 11 available to users, though its launch was controversial due to the TPM 2.0 minimum specs requirement. Microsoft addressed this by publishing a document that explains how to enable TPM 2.0 on PCs, though not every computer supports it.

This OneDrive change will primarily impact users who are still using Windows on older hardware — if the model is more than five years old, there's a good chance it doesn't support Windows 11's minimum requirements, though making the jump to Windows 10 remains an option.