During its Windows Hardware Engineering Community (WinHEC) summit in Shenzhen, China, Microsoft has announced that Windows 10 OS will be launching this summer in 190 countries and 111 languages.

While it was quite keen to brag how Windows has always been global with more than 1.5 billion users around the world and hundreds of millions of PCs operating on Windows in China alone, the important piece of information was that it will launch this summer. While Microsoft did not give any specific date, the summer launch scheduled is still earlier than previously expected fall release.

Microsoft also pointed out its commitment to offer a free upgrade to Windows 10 for its customers running on Windows 7, Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1 during first year after it is released but also shed some more quite interesting information. Microsoft also used that same chance to show some hardware innovations enabled by Windows 10 as well as talk about its strategic partners in China, including Lenovo, Tencent and Qihu 360, which will "will help Windows 10 reach hundreds of millions of customers in China and spur adoption of Windows 10 worldwide."

There were also some rumors that Windows 10 might be a free upgrade to those running pirated Windows 7 and Windows 8 versions, which stirred a lot of attention. But according to latest Microsoft clarification, the company will apparently allow upgrades from pirated copies of Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 systems but these will still be illegal, and as always will not get full support from Microsoft. There have been plenty of cases where customers did not even know that they have an illegal copy and hopefully Microsoft will further clarify this move as we draw closer to the launch of the Windows 10.

We are certainly looking forward to the Windows 10 OS, mostly due to improvements coming with DirectX 12 API and now it appears that we will not have to wait for long.



Source: Windows Blog.