Microsoft is pulling the plug on Windows Vista, the operating system everybody loved to hate

After 10 long years, Microsoft is finally - mercifully - putting Windows Vista out of its misery. On April 11, the software giant will cease to support the decade-old operating system.

"Microsoft has provided support for Windows Vista for the past 10 years," the company said in a statement. "But the time has come for us, along with our hardware and software partners, to invest our resources towards more recent technologies so that we can continue to deliver great new experiences."

The news that Windows Vista is even still around will likely come as a shock to many readers, as the operating system faced criticism and resistance from the first day it was rolled out in 2007 to replace the widely-celebrated Windows XP.

In fact, while Windows XP still enjoys 8% of desktop market share despite support having been discontinued in 2014, Vista can only be found on 0.78% of desktops.

Microsoft's announcement puts an end to one of its most highly-anticipated and widely-disappointing operating systems. Though the visual improvements were widely welcomed by PC owners, they quickly found that Vista was buggy and unreliable. Dell, HP and Lenovo were soon including disc copies of XP with all new computer purchases, as Microsoft mandates that all their hardware have Vista pre-installed. Apple even joined in on the Vista beat-down with it's famous commercials.

If you're one of the 0.78% of users still on Windows Vista, know that it's probably time to move on, and that Business Insider highly recommends Windows 10. Or, you know, you could just go back to XP.