Disabling forced upgrade of Skype 7.41 to Skype 8

[aor999]

I don't know where to open this thread. Admins can move it to the correct board if it is in the wrong one.
Anyway: recently, my Skype 7.41 started to display messages in its home page, that it will be disabled if I won't upgrade to the new Skype 8, which have a crap interface, missing lot of options and contact statuses.
How I can prevent my current Skype 7.41 from being disabled and get rid of the message at the home page of Skype?

 

[Kiril_Petkov]

There are few ways, but eventually MS will force you to update. I am currently with 7.41 and dont have messages for update. Depending of you OS you could stop the skype upd service or redirect the update IPs.

 

[aor999]

This is the message that appears in my Skype home page (Sorry that it is in Hebrew):

Translation to English: "This version of Skype will be disabled soon. To continue using Skype, please update to the newest version"

It don't plan to upgrade my Skype without my knowledge, but simply to disable it, so I couldn't use it, until I will upgrade it manually.

Update: I've read here that Skype 7 will stop working after September 1, 2018.

 

[Kiril_Petkov]

MS extended this date because too many people complain they dont like the new skype, but at some point we wont have choose.

 

[aor999]

My Skype 7.41 don't contains the Skype Updater service. But sometimes, it would silently download SkypeSetup.exe into C:\Users\<user name>\AppData\Local\Temp, and will display a message that the new Skype version is ready to be installed.