Are you ready for the end of Windows 7?

Ah but it does Derek hence the large numbers of very upset computer users complaining on most Windows tech websites and even more cursing Windows on LInux websites .
Windows answer —–reinstall yes very good answer –not !
As you wont believe me here is MS ,s OWN comments on it-
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/client-management/troubleshoot-stop-errors
and another website-
https://recoverit.wondershare.com/computer-problems/fix-windows-10-update-when-it-freezes-or-crashes.html
I have webpage after webpage of complaints from Australia to Canada.

Duncan I did not say that Windows 10 never fails but simply that your inference that such failures are the norm seems to be untrue.

The users who would wish to post comments on tech sites are obviously more likely to refer to problems. I would guess that most ordinary Windows 10 users [like me] are quite satisfied with its performance and have little to complain about. The purists and those looking for superlative functionality and speed of response are not entirely representative in my opinion. Some users are more than happy to jog along in the ‘slow’ lane. Having spent over thirty years hammering stuff out on a typewriter and then a word processor, any computer is a welcome miracle. Believe it or not, I sometimes miss Vista – again reviled by the cognoscenti.

I am looking to replace the laptop which runs on Windows 7 and will probably use Windows 10 for full compatibility with the desktop PC. I can’t see any operating disadvantages at present with Windows 10.

Fair enough John but if I remember right there was a convo on Windows 10 and it got plenty of posts?
Windows 7 will still update with critical downloads for 5 years its the security updates that are stopping and think on this every few weeks I get notified of a large number of security downloads in Windows 10 to plug holes that are caused by their snooping and backdoors .
Windows 7 can carry on if you download a good computer and broadband malware protection programme .
Linux doesn’t have those large security updates usually general app updates and I can watch every single one of the downloads and stop any I don’t want , its easy to do -I need first to allow a download -second I need to approve by entering a code that the download can start -third I can cancel it at any time .
One area on Linux is vital the Kernel but that too gets the next mark number downloaded every month or so and you can read all about it on the forum website and talk to the software engineers –try doing that with Windows 10 in the closed system .

Duncan – You might be recalling this one from June 2018 –
https://conversation.which.co.uk/technology/microsoft-windows-10-updates-issues/

It attracted 33 comments, reasonably balanced for and against. You submitted 11.and Derek 6.

I started using Windows 10 when I bought a new PC a couple of years ago. While I wish they wouldn’t change the way things work – I’d become used to Vista – I soon got to grips with it and have had no problems. Simply a means to an end in my case.

And according to Windows Report MS apologises for a “typo ” error –
quote-
The Build Developer Conference was a pretty busy event for Microsoft. Thousands of developers attended the event to hear the latest news from Microsoft.

Recently, Twitter user Ginny Caughey shared a slide from a session held to discuss the increasing popularity of Windows 10 among enterprise users.

The slide named “Most PCs are or soon will be on Windows 10” showed impressive numbers for Windows 10. It clearly stated that more than 900M devices are currently running Windows 10 and Microsoft hopes the number will increase very soon.

However, this number seems to be far from reality and different from the figures claimed by Microsoft in March 2019. The tech giant claimed that there are around 800 million active Windows 10 devices around the world. Apparently, Microsoft took this figure from Forrester Research.

Microsoft finally admits it’s a typo

As a matter of fact,one Windows AppConsult Engineer from Microsoft apologized and confirmed the information was indeed a typo. He says that the company has now fixed the wrong figure.

Thanks for the heads up! Yes it was indeed a typo, sorry for that. It has been fixed in the slides for the participants ?

I have used Kaspersky for many years, probably nearly as long as it has been around.

alfa, I think Microsoft would say that because Windows 7 PC’s can be “upgraded” (n.b. their words) to Windows 10, there is no need for them to support two different OS families when it is more efficient to support a single one.(As tested only a few weeks ago here, upgrades from W7 and W8 to W10 are free and easy to carry out. I even managed to upgrade my 9 years old MSI U180 Intel Atom netbook to run W10.)

Those business who beg to differ can choose to pay for extended Windows 7 support. Elsewhere in the work place the retirement of Windows 7 will make Windows 10 commonplace. I think it then follows that most folk who use Windows 10 at work (or at school) would prefer to use the same OS at home.

To put this in proper perspective, for many users the OS is only the vehicle from which they launch their favourite apps. If you do what I do – and pin those apps to the taskbar, then Windows 10 and Windows 7 are very similar to use.

Excellent Alfa especially at this time of the year when we are supposed to have a more “spiritual view” of of those around us but really its all about big business profit that’s the only real god nowadays and don’t dare criticise it or you will get the “Mark of Wallstreet ” on your brow.
Lets not forget the African countries where US “big oil ” plundered several countries leaving the same devastation as your picture shows and zero compensation or clean-up by them . Fishing waters ruined ,farmland full of heavy metal Africans dying of cancer its just goes on .
I hope your post breaths a bit of “spirituality ” into some not “commerciality ” .

Duncan, for those who want to operate PC’s without being beholden to proprietary software and the whims of its owners, there is always GNU/Linux.

Why do you think Alfa subtly pictured Linux penguins Derek ?
she was making a good point ,of course those “part of the system ” wont like the apple-cart upset but I was never set upon this earth to be beholden to any US giant conglomerate .
Redmond isn’t daft – about 15 % shares in the Linux Foundation –buying up GitHub – buying into Red Hat then “kidding us on ” –oh no we wont change anything – aye sure you wont !
Its set the teeth on edge of every free thinking tech on the planet.

Change the shell of Windows 10 to “look like ” Windows 7 –are you kidding Derek ? is that supposed to make us feel better ?–underneath its Windows 10 as a SERVICE all the way with much more control and snooping .
I posted how you could hit MS hard by removing programming to stop blue screening and lessen control but Win 10 Service takes the huff and wont let you upgrade which is a –yes Service issue.

Derek said ‘I even managed to upgrade my 9 years old …’

My computer was 9 years old last week on the 15th November.

Of course Microsoft will say it is capable of being upgraded, I am sure it is, but that is not the point.

When I bought my computer, SSDs were new and very expensive and we were led to believe Windows 7 only needed a 40GB SSD, so that is what I got. Six months later, I could no longer do updates until I installed a much larger SSD.

Tech companies drip-feed us little upgrades, you update to the latest and very soon a newer version is released. That newer version will likely be incompatible with something, all designed to keep you buying more and more before much of it is worn out. And that is now unsustainable, we cannot keep replacing stuff just because the tech giants need us to line their pockets.

Companies would not be highly profitable if they made products that lasted for many years without getting customers to spend money on them. Look at the cost of having a car serviced by a main dealer.

My first computer – a Macintosh Classic II – came with a 40 MB hard drive, but that was back in 1992.

Hi alfa, the oldest machine I have W10 running on is a 2006 Acer laptop.

That machine was (and is) slow when running Vista and it seems to be equally slow running W10. Nonetheless, it still works. (It only really ever seemed slick and fast when running XP, but that’s another story.)

Although the official minimum disc size needed for W10 is 32GB, I think most users should aim to have at least 64GB. Of course, opting for 128GB or more will be better. Similarly, although W10 will work with as little as 1GB of RAM, users should really aim to have at least 4GB. Also really, anyone buying a brand new laptop really now ought to make sure they get (at least) a full HD screen.

I’ve never run Windows 7 from an SSD. But, because SSD’s are now widely available and relatively inexpensive, I’d say it was desirable, though not essential, to run Windows 10 from an SSD. Even then it will still be slower than Linux, but still a good all round choice.

Last week, I helped to upgrade a student’s Lenovo laptop to Windows 10 from Ubuntu Linux, because (a) there were problems with Linux crashing on that machine and (b) Linux did not give the user access to all their favourite apps.

wavechange, Apple certainly show that, when they withdraw OS support after only about 6 or 7 years and make laptops that are almost impossible to repair if they go wrong.

Duncan, I wasn’t suggesting any need to customise the W10 desktop other than to make good use of the common features it has inherited from Windows 7.

Also, as regards “blue screen” faults, did you actually bother to read that webpage you linked to? I think it shows that 70% of blue screen events were caused by bugs in 3rd party drivers, 10% by faulty hardware and only 5% by bugs in Microsoft code. The causes of the remaining 15% could not be determined.

I’m no enthusiast of Apple as a company, Derek, but have had very good service from their computers, both at work and at home. I would not want to use a computer more than 6 or 7 years routinely because newer machines perform better, but I do use old Macs offline, mainly to run obsolete software, do PowerPoint presentations and display photos.

I’m well aware that Apple laptops are almost impossible to repair, but thankfully I’ve been very lucky. I wonder if other makes are easier to fix.

Sorry Derek, but you are not helping. Just because something is possible, doesn’t make it right.

Microsoft could accept it has 2 types of users – those who are happy with dumb terminals and those who want control over their PCs. Many Windows 7 users do not want or like Windows 10.

Also many Windows 7 PCs will be in poorer parts of the world and may already have been upgraded so further upgrades could be impossible.

Yes, Kate, but I have seen tales of woe where peripherals give unexpected (and mostly undesirable) “gotchas”. Webcams of weird aspect ration and unadjustable video parameters, mouse pads that have either hypersensitivity or insensitivity that is unadjustable to name but two. Need to approach with some care.

Once you switch out of Windows S mode you cant get back in ,here is Windows themselves-
Windows 10 in S mode is designed for security and performance, exclusively running apps from the Microsoft Store. If you want to install an app that isn’t available in the Microsoft Store, you’ll need to switch out of S mode. Switching out of S mode is one-way. If you make the switch, you won’t be able to go back to Windows 10 in S mode. There’s no charge to switch out of S mode.

S mode sounds interesting, but might just be a poor alternative to a nice Chromebook 😉

As a further comment on Windows 10S, I noticed today that a high proportion of the laptops on sale in Currys now come in S mode.

I’d be interested to hear more about software that runs on W7 and W8 but not on W10.

Other than the case of specific printer drivers for old printers (e.g. Canon MP 750 and HP Laserjet 1018), I’ve not seen any examples from my favourite apps here. Even for those cases however, the option of running W7 or XP (yeah!) in a virtual machine might provide an acceptable workaround.

I’m really impressed by Roger’s fortitude in considering moving to W8.1 instead of W10.

Even as a competent user of XP/W7/W10, I find W8 & W8.1 really hard to use, so I’ve never wanted to buy any such machines to add to my reference collection.

it did tend to use much more CPU time here is Windows themselves-

Starting with Windows 8, a change was made to the way that Task Manager and Performance Monitor report CPU utilization. With this change, CPU utilization may appear to exceed 100% when the system is under a heavy load, especially when capacity is boosted by Intel Turbo Boost.

Cause
This change affects the way that CPU utilization is computed. The values in Task Manager now correspond to the Processor Information% Processor Utility and Processor Information% Privileged Utility performance counters, not to the Processor Information% Processor Time and Processor Information% Privileged Time counters as in Windows 7.

Tip change Superfetch to manual then check out -Service Host -Local System
if you are VERY brave –end process or “power options ” -set to Standard
With TWO browsers open I am using 2 % / 3 % processor ( CPU ) use and that’s my old machine . One reason for the low percentage processor use is that I have an upmarket gaming card installed which takes care of action on the screen by using its own video processing .

I too think Roger is “Brave “.

Apologies for delay in continuity, Kate. The main reason is to backward compatibility – to preserve the ability to run legacy software that W10 cut off, closely followed by relatively easy access to external port pins for Beeb/Pi-esque experiments on serial/parallel port-rich laptops (ok, not quite as simple as Peek and Poke, but…). If I can buy four more years of secure performance without having to step through to W10 for a few tens of pounds, that for me is good value!

This is closely followed by the fact that I want to choose when to have extensive down time to let Microsoft perform open heart surgery on the operating system. Ok, it happens less often since leaving full-time employment, but there were periods when I would – with only coffee and meal breaks – work through for 36 or more hours on deadlines. If any of those coincided with an impromptu and impossible-to-stave-off operating system upgrade I’d have potentially lost unaffordable “mill” hours (a relatively new laptop running 10 started such an upgrade and was still doing it 6 hours later a few months ago).

I agree there is a risk in buying licenses from eBay. Does anyone know of a more reliable source? About 25 years ago I approved purchase of something like 100 Dos 6 licenses for product we installed that contained embedded PCs running an EXE program from ROM that controlled critical hardware. The last thing we wanted was an operating system that supported background tasks!

I haven;’t looked lately, but when I toyed with getting a W10 license from M$ back in ~2011, I think it allowed a free option to upgrade to 8.1 – but it was a one way street. If I did so I couldn’t then revert to 10. I guess I could go that route for a few years?

I thought – perhaps wrongly – that you could make W8.1 look and feel like W7 making it ostensibly identical to use as W7 once you’d done the TweakUI?

Roger I checked out some Win 8.1 ISO downloads some are “dicey ” don’t go direct , go via tracking & advertising servers use this one it has a genuine Comodo safety certificate-
https://softlay.net/operating-system/windows-8-1-pro-iso-download.html
You could teak the UI but that wont change the underlying reason many weren’t happy with this system BUT as I said above you can minimise the problems by making programming changes (there are more ) .

Roger, there are software apps like ClassicShell (see:-http://www.classicshell.net/ – N.B. Caution http: site !) and its successor OpenShell (see:-https://open-shell.github.io/Open-Shell-Menu/ ) that bring back more classic look and feel for modern versions of Windows, especially Windows 8.

Now that there is an open source version, there should also be confidence that these apps won’t wilfully or otherwise add unrevealed security vulnerabilities to a Windows system.

Thanks for that Duncan – most helpful. I’ll grab the media for installation.

Still to work out how best to legitimise it. I wonder if I can upgrade from W7 still for a pittance.. 😉

I tried ClassicShell, Derek, and a couple of others, but none are any good at working from the existing vhd files I have (which were in turn “ghosted” from working old Windows computers and therefore have working and correctly licensed/installed software). I think it has to be the VM engine – which 10 has cut off.

Roger – thanks for the feedback.

I’ve never tried the likes of ClassicShell myself, because I just see learning to drive (yet another) OS as part of life long learning.

I guess if you are using Microsoft Virtual PC (as in:-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Virtual_PC ) then that doesn’t work under W10. Hence, if you adopt W10, you might need an alternative (e.g see:-https://alternativeto.net/software/virtual-pc/ ).

I’ve been using VirtualBox for years, either on Windows or Linux hosts. That may support the use of vhd files, see 5.2 in here:-https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch05.html . Even in its free version, it certainly runs XP, Linux and BSD vm’s quite well.

That path has been rejected by Redmond Wavechange (last sentence ) due to competition from Mobile Broadband Windows Enterprise (business Windows ) already get charged .
You can quote figures for the large number of Windows users on the planet it still doesn’t get away from the fact that Mobile outnumber them and that’s why MS Redmond has “bought into ” Linux—future profit.

I did not know (or maybe did not want to know) of Microsoft’s involvement with Linux. Is nothing sacred?

Microsoft are way behind the curve there. It has been quite a few years since Apple and Sony decided to base their proprietary OSes (e.g. MacOS, iOS and whatever it is that PlayStations run) on BSD Unix (i.e. functionally very like Linux but with even more liberal free licencing conditions).

For the ultimate in long term product support, there is much to be said for the business model in which customers pay annually. That works for me with car servicing and it also works for a lot of software, including many engineering apps and the non-free supported versions of Linux.

AV and other software will eventually stop supporting Windows 7. But, if Windows XP is anything to go by, it’ll be a couple of years before that happens.

Yes zero -day vulnerabilities can affect systems that are no longer updated as they apply to the actual programming of installed software and basic programming but Tannya has a point if you install a GOOD protection system then those vulnerabilities will , for the most part, be protected .
Critical updates will still be applied for some years yet.

Tannya has some good points here and, as I’ve already said, one my of brothers (the IT Director one) still uses XP (with current virus protection) on his home PC.

As for my own XP machines, I’ve got AVG AntiVirus Free 18.8 installed on them, even though they’re not usually allowed on-line. But that a/v app still works and still receives virus definition updates.

But here’s the thing. Using XP now, or Windows 7 after its end-of-support, is a bit driving a classic car that no longer has a requirement for a current MoT. In all likelihood, that car just won’t be as safe and capable on the road as a new car that is still under warranty and maintained in accordance with its service plan.

Given that Which? is campaigning to help protect consumers from online scams – and to ensure that they get compensation if they’re scammed and its not their fault – I don’t think Which? can recommend the option of carrying on with Windows 7 on-line.

To use another example, it would a bit like Which? advising consumers that it is OK to carry on using unmodified Whirlpool tumble dryers, even though we all know that they are subject to a safety recall and are supposed to be either replaced or upgraded.

Just picking out one bank at random, see:-https://www.barclays.co.uk/ways-to-bank/online-banking/online-mobile-banking-guarantee/, we can can see that bank customers are expected to “Carry out regular internet security checks and software updates”. Anyone still using XP or Vista cannot currently do that as completely as those using supported OSes and I worry that such failures might leave banks with “wiggle room” when deciding whether or not they should refund scam victims.

Finally, we’ve already noted that “upgrades” from W7 to W10 are still free, so there is no need to “hand over hundreds of pounds to Microsoft for the “privilege” of continuing to use a W7 PC”.

You’re very, very wrong. In May 2017 hospital wards closed and operations missed because obsolete machines were connected to the Internet.

It was not because “obsolete machines were connected to the Internet.”; it was because NHS IT staff had not been obtaining the latest updates to protect the OSes concerned.

So perhaps my step via 8.1 for a few years is not only… what was the word…fortitudinous, but also unnecessary provided I hit the machine with Kaspersky or similar?

Thats correct Roger but it MUST be their TOTAL version which covers both computer & internet.

A good a/v & security suite will obviously help to prevent infections but operates at a different layer from a properly patched OS. So those two items should be regarded as separate and largely independent lines of defence.

Thanks Derek and Duncan.
I will explore the options.

Just buy a good malware and internet protection programme Tamsyn that will make a world of a difference to your piece of mind as the internet properties will stop you reaching/clicking on malware invested websites of all sorts .

Hi Tamsyn

If you want to do get a proper job done by upgrading to Windows 10, and if you cannot scrounge help with that from anyone you know, then you may need to pay a good local independent computer shop to do it.

Some of these businesses are even registered as Which? Trusted Traders, including this Gloucester one:-http://www.cotswoldcomputermedic.co.uk/contact-us/

Obviously the likes of Currys-PC World of rip-offs won’t want to help with this – they’d want to sell you a new PC (plus accessories and add-ons) instead.