[zeugma]

OS upgrades are different than support. It’s a stable OS, there’s not a lot of need for patching it besides new security threats. You can still submit something to MS tech support and get an answer, that is what is meant by they are supporting the OS.

Suppose for some reason you wanted to upgrade to the latest version of IE? Strangely, though firefox will run on just about any computer on the planet, IE9 only runs on more recent versions of MS-Windows. I'm not an MS-Windows user so this is purely hypothetical on my part.

[Boogieman]

Supporting an OS doesn’t mean the latest and greatest software will run on it either.