Win 7 users, what's your plan come end of the year?

Paying for extended support sounds attractive to me, half my spare parts either don't have digital motherboard audio and even the intel hd graphics for this other motherboard have win 8.1 but not 10 drivers.  Yet the ones on my gaming system are one generation up and fully supported.

Or maybe you'll just tighten up your security and still run it? 

Not a Win7 user but...

2 hours ago, invictius said:

Or maybe you'll just tighten up your security and still run it? 

On your main machine after the OS goes EOL, that would be pretty irresponsible. Then again, there's people who still use XP on their every day machine, an OS that went EOL way back in 2014...

The problem here is, that the extended support is not exactly cheap, the price doubles every year, and it's also not available for non-Enterprise customers. This extended support is not indefinite either, it can only be extended to up to 3 more years after it goes EOL.

Depending on the edition, the prices are:

- Professional

• Year 1 - 50$ per device.
• Year 2 - 100$ per device.
• Year 3 - 200$ per device.

- Enterprise

• Year 1 - 25$ per device.
• Year 2 - 50$ per device.
• Year 3 - 100$ per device.

The best options would be to either upgrade to 10, or move to Linux, macOS, or another alternative.

I'll keep using 7 like I always have. I'm not giving M$ another dime just to support my OS. That's just a scummy thing to make you pay them for.

1 hour ago, Nevander said:

I'll keep using 7 like I always have. I'm not giving M$ another dime just to support my OS. That's just a scummy thing to make you pay them for.

Windows 10 can be activated from a comparative 7 or 8 key (i.e Windows 10 Pro from a 7 Pro key).

I am not going to be nagged into purchasing extended support or upgrading to 10. If users find a way to stop that, I will use that.

When it is out of service i will not care!!!!!!!

Eventually a PC upgrade with Win10. Would've upgraded by now, but did something very dumb last summer and so now am in a fair bit of debt, which means my upgrade is somewhat delayed.

The core of my PC is from 2011, and I don't think Win10 will support a Sandy Bridge processor, so really no other way out of it.

Much like judgement day, Windows 10 is inevitable. I tried to get Windows 7 running on a new board for a customer recently. Was not a good time.

I have gotten Windows 10 running on customer's computers dating back to 2009. Particularly if you pair it with an SSD, performance is usually fine. Windows 10 does seem to be more demanding of hard drives though. So if you are still an old mechanical hard drive that's maybe a bit worn out, a switch to Windows 10 on the same drive will likely result in noticeable performance deterioration. A clean format rather than an in place upgrade will get a better result. Using the Windows Media Creation Toolkit you can create installer USBs, or do an in place upgrade. Edward is correct, any valid Windows 7 or 8 license can generally still be used with the installers. I have used Windows 7 license keys from name brand computers to clean install Windows 10 fine.

I would not wish Mac OS on anyone though, especially a gamer. Personally, I find it one of the most infuriatingly obtuse OSes ever created and it only seems to get worse with each passing iteration.

I upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows 8.1 back in 2015 then to Windows 10 in 2016

Switched to Linux when Vista sucked and never looked back. Sometimes I miss being able to play every PC game without hassle but I have tons of consoles and I generally prefer those anyway.

Plus Doom works fine on Linux.

7 hours ago, Edward850 said:

Windows 10 can be activated from a comparative 7 or 8 key (i.e Windows 10 Pro from a 7 Pro key).

^He's right you know.

I upgraded from 7 to 10 earlier this year; mostly because games are starting to have problems with Windows 7. In my case Resident Evil 7 and Sunset Overdrive just not launching, or getting stuck in loops. It's a free upgrade as well, as long as you have a legitimate copy of Windows installed.

I remember when 10 was launching they said it was a limited time offer, but from what I've gathered they have to offer it because of the disability options present in the OS. So since they offer functions to assist the deaf/hard of hearing, or the blind, or what have you, they have to continue offering support for those functions. Easier to just give a free upgrade than continue to upgrade a defunct OS. And really, after spending some time getting Windows 10 set up, it's not much different from 7. I prefer 7, but change happens.

I won't upgrade from Win 7 to Win 10 until i build a new PC (i mean to me there is no point in installing a newer OS on older hardware) and i have no idea when that will be to be honest. I started using Win 7 around 2013-ish on a laptop, so it was quite late. I'm also not quite fond of change so i tend to use things for a long time unless they break. 

Since my copy of Win 7 Ultimate isn't legit, i'll have to find a copy of Win 10 somewhere because i am not paying for it. Although i could use the sticker on my old laptop (that i do not use anymore) for Win 10 i guess. I'm just not sure if it would be able to upgrade me to Win 10 Pro or not.

I've got 2 home computers, a pretty powerful one (i7 with 16gb ram, not bad) and a more standard one (i5 with 8gb ram). I'm going to update the one running Windows 8 to Win 10 and just leave 7 on the weaker one and only bring it online when necessary. I've heard a lot of people who use depreciated/old software say that Windows 7 runs basically anything old better than Windows 10 does. If that ends up being the case, well, the older PC will just get more use then I guess.

If I could upgrade to 10 with literally zero changes to UI and program support I'd have done so when 10 first came out.

49 minutes ago, Doomkid said:

I've heard a lot of people who use depreciated/old software say that Windows 7 runs basically anything old better than Windows 10 does. If that ends up being the case, well, the older PC will just get more use then I guess.

That also extends to games, some fairly old games can struggle on 10 sometimes (provided they can still run at all), so unless you're playing lots of oldies or using other kinds of ancient software, it should be okay. This is not surprising at all for an OS that goes through 2 major revisions every year and has less legacy stuff in it.

I'd like to see more people giving it a shot tbh, because it really isn't half as bad as some love making it look.

5 hours ago, Dark Pulse said:

The core of my PC is from 2011, and I don't think Win10 will support a Sandy Bridge processor, so really no other way out of it.

I'm pretty sure I had Windows 10 running on an Bloomfield (specifically the i7-930), which predates Sandy Bridge, and didn't notice much in the way of performance penalties.

Course, I'm running Win10 on a Kaby Lake processor build now (i7-7700K), and if I ever go back to that old build for retro purposes (IDK why, since Win10 seems to run Win7 era games just fine and I already have a few XP builds, but [shrug]), I'd be putting Win 7 on it again (it just feels right, y'know?), but tossing this anecdote out there anyway.

3 hours ago, CyberDreams said:

I won't upgrade from Win 7 to Win 10 until i build a new PC (i mean to me there is no point in installing a newer OS on older hardware) and i have no idea when that will be to be honest.

I ended up doing just that last month. Sadly, Windows 7 is becoming increasingly less viable for playing modern games--no DX12 support, no Xb1 controller support over bluetooth, newer games just outright not supporting 7--but there are a few older games that work on 7 but not 10, so I can't use 10 for everything either.

And to be honest, there are also some nice features that 10 has over 7, such the Win+X menu which I now use daily for my shutting down and restarting needs, and I prefer the visual style of 10 over 7 (and it also has dark UI mode). There is also WSL, which I know a lot developers like and use (although I ended up going back to cygwin because it suits my needs better) and virtual desktops which people have been asking for since forever (and both Linux and macOS have had for who knows how long).

I use Win XP since 2003. Advice for not supported OS users - just get Avast and find some security tips for not supported OS on internet.

6 hours ago, Murdoch said:

Much like judgement day, Windows 10 is inevitable. I tried to get Windows 7 running on a new board for a customer recently. Was not a good time.

Not unexpectedly, considering that Microsoft, for understandable reasons, is not updating their motherboard drivers for Win7 anymore, because it'd not only sabotage their desire to see users upgraded but would also result in a lot more work.

6 hours ago, Murdoch said:

 

I have gotten Windows 10 running on customer's computers dating back to 2009. Particularly if you pair it with an SSD, performance is usually fine. Windows 10 does seem to be more demanding of hard drives though. So if you are still an old mechanical hard drive that's maybe a bit worn out, a switch to Windows 10 on the same drive will likely result in noticeable performance deterioration. A clean format rather than an in place upgrade will get a better result. Using the Windows Media Creation Toolkit you can create installer USBs, or do an in place upgrade. Edward is correct, any valid Windows 7 or 8 license can generally still be used with the installers. I have used Windows 7 license keys from name brand computers to clean install Windows 10 fine. 

Sadly not every license. I got a windows 8.1 license from a previous employer's MSDN subscription and this cannot be upgraded at all. If I wanted to migrate I'd have to buy a new one, so I'll just wait it out. My system is already 7 years old so I'll just wait and see if it survives until Windows 8.1 gets un-supported as well.

6 hours ago, Murdoch said:

I would not wish Mac OS on anyone though, especially a gamer. Personally, I find it one of the most infuriatingly obtuse OSes ever created and it only seems to get worse with each passing iteration.

That statement just made my day. :) I have to deal with  that CrapOS every single day as an iOS developer and calling it infuriating would be a major understatement. I'll never get why people think so highly of Apple. And the 10.14 updowngrade broke a large piece of older tools I was using, thanks to crippling 32 bit support. It was forced on my by Apple because XCode does not work anymore with 10.13.

10 minutes ago, Loud Silence said:

I use Win XP since 2003. Advice for not supported OS users - just get Avast and find some security tips for not supported OS on internet.

People like you are a threat to the entire internet. Running an obsolete system makes you a first grade candidate for getting hijacked by a botnet, and no antivirus will help you then - the more dangerous threats do not get into such old systems by the actions these protect against but by exploiting security vulnerabilities of the system itself. AV software is mainly snake oil anyway, the only thing they are good at is to protect you from infected downloads.

Also good luck with getting cut off from more recent software. Increasingly more applications drop XP support, now that the most current Visual C compiler no longer targets it and a lot of software goes 64 bit only. Use of 32 bit has dropped so far by now that it's only a matter of time until the software follows suit - the recent GZDoom survey we ran said 1.5% of all users are on 32 bit - last year it said 4%. Advance one more year and it'll become uneconomical to even bother with it anymore.

3 hours ago, Shadow Hog said:

I'm pretty sure I had Windows 10 running on an Bloomfield (specifically the i7-930), which predates Sandy Bridge, and didn't notice much in the way of performance penalties.

 

Course, I'm running Win10 on a Kaby Lake processor build now (i7-7700K), and if I ever go back to that old build for retro purposes (IDK why, since Win10 seems to run Win7 era games just fine and I already have a few XP builds, but [shrug]), I'd be putting Win 7 on it again (it just feels right, y'know?), but tossing this anecdote out there anyway.

I'd still like to upgrade; I do a fair bit of gaming, and a not-trivial amount of Photoshop work.

It's served me well and is my longest-lived system, but newer games are definitely making it feel the pinch, and CPU-intensive stuff like SEUS for Minecraft makes it chug brutally.

2 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

 

Not unexpectedly, considering that Microsoft, for understandable reasons, is not updating their motherboard drivers for Win7 anymore, because it'd not only sabotage their desire to see users upgraded but would also result in a lot more work.

Oh sure. I told the customer it was a risk. I cannot quite recall why exactly they wanted 7 but I solved the situation somehow. I could not even get the USB to work. That was loads of fun.

Quote

Sadly not every license. I got a windows 8.1 license from a previous employer's MSDN subscription and this cannot be upgraded at all. If I wanted to migrate I'd have to buy a new one, so I'll just wait it out. My system is already 7 years old so I'll just wait and see if it survives until Windows 8.1 gets un-supported as well.

Right yes, such licenses can be finicky. I did have one or two fail, but most of them seem to work fine.

2 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

That statement just made my day. :) I have to deal with  that CrapOS every single day as an iOS developer and calling it infuriating would be a major understatement. I'll never get why people think so highly of Apple. And the 10.14 updowngrade broke a large piece of older tools I was using, thanks to crippling 32 bit support. It was forced on my by Apple because XCode does not work anymore with 10.13.

Good times. I have often described Mac OS as a snake eating it's own tail. It is so obsessed with simplicity that it is making things complicated again. Apple's success is a combination of most good marketing (in the old days at least, their ads over the last few years have been a joke), rabid fanboyism, and people's tendency to hold onto ideas long after they have become no longer objectively true. I cannot remember the last time I had a PC in with a genuine virus - it's mostly nuisance stuff like dodgy util apps and Chrome extensions. It would have been probably a year ago. And yet Windows has a reputation for viruses and Macs still have a reputation for being immune to viruses in spite of the fact that the worst case of infection I have seen in the last three years was a Mac. Could not do a thing without getting hammered with ads. Even got shell scripts into the system directory. People also claim they are best for photography and design work. That might have been true twenty years ago. But now all the major design apps are identical on both platforms. Invest in a decent screen and you have a design experience almost as good if not identical to a Mac for a considerably smaller price I would wager.

2 hours ago, Loud Silence said:

I use Win XP since 2003. Advice for not supported OS users - just get Avast and find some security tips for not supported OS on internet.

I concur with Graf. Running XP in this day and age in any way other than an offline legacy machine is insanity. I do not know any mission critical software that will still allow installations on XP. You might have a semi-up to date copy of say Chrome or Firefox that still loads most sites. I hope you have your installers archived for when you drive fails because finding them again might be tricky. And when your motherboard goes, game over. Also Avast is kind of crap. I have seen it miss a few infections here and there, and it's a bit of a resource hog too. You seem to think you can "see" every security intrusion. Not every security compromise will make it's presence obvious, though I do agree common sense and smart practices are more important than anti-virus itself. I hope for your sake at least you do not do online banking on that machine. 

I'd love to recommend GNU/Linux to all those who no longer want to use Windows (case in point: those here who don't want -- or cannot! -- upgrade to Windows 10), but I don't know which distro is the nicest to use. By default that would be Ubuntu, but even that seems to fail fatally when doing certain basic things such as upgrading the OS (by comparison, both Windows and macOS are rock-solid with updates, no need to do backups). I guess quality will never be as good with volunteer work (including company-financed community contributions) as it is with paid software.

Also: modern games. I suspect their Ubuntu support is as bad as their macOS support.

Seriously, I'd recommend Windows 10 night and day. You can turn on its privacy settings at startup, and it's just a very smart OS by now. It's no longer the obtuse Windows 8 attempt from the Ballmer years.

18 minutes ago, printz said:

both Windows and macOS are rock-solid with updates, no need to do backups).

That depends on each user's experience though :p .

If you do a quick search for something to the effect of "Windows major update problems", you'll inevitably run into lots of people complaining about buggy updates and BSODs. Granted, I do believe that at this point, these issues are blown out of proportion (though cases do certainly exist). Also MS introduces a bug or two with almost every update, but those usually get sorted out in the next one. I've personally never had major issues with updates on W10, and I've been using it since ver 1607.

46 minutes ago, Murdoch said:

Also Avast is kind of crap. I have seen it miss a few infections here and there, and it's a bit of a resource hog too.

Agreed with the rest, but about this particular point: Not only it is a resource hog, but its detection is lacking in addition to deliberately leaving stuff behind after uninstall (various users have discovered it leaving .exes behind in folders, most notably an overseer.exe). Avast and AVG are 2 AV products I recommend anyone avoiding, there's better alternatives out there.

6 hours ago, CyberDreams said:

I won't upgrade from Win 7 to Win 10 until i build a new PC (i mean to me there is no point in installing a newer OS on older hardware)

That's pretty much what I've been doing. My PCs generally survive very long, but I do get rid of old ones if they break (or just stick them in the closet and use them once in a blue moon if they don't break), and every once in a while I do get a new one. Right now I have 3 computers running Win10, 2 running Win7, 1 running Vista and 1 running XP. The Win10 and Vista systems are used the most often (simply because the Vista desktop used to be my gaming machine and it still has a lot of games, which are oldies at this point).

3 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

People like you are a threat to the entire internet.

The entire internet? You mean the entire internet of losers running obsolete OSes? If by your theory, running a supported OS is what makes you protected, then what's the problem?

3 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

the more dangerous threats do not get into such old systems by the actions these protect against but by exploiting security vulnerabilities of the system itself

Not even XP past SP1 has any vulnerability than can be exploited in a completely passive way. It's all due to user actions.

3 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

AV software is mainly snake oil anyway, the only thing they are good at is to protect you from infected downloads.

True.

3 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

Also good luck with getting cut off from more recent software. Increasingly more applications drop XP support

This is also true. What pisses me off is that a lot of them went the lazy route and dropped Vista support at the same time, years ago. But can't blame them, Microsoft did the same.

11 minutes ago, dr_st said:

The entire internet? You mean the entire internet of losers running obsolete OSes? If by your theory, running a supported OS is what makes you protected, then what's the problem?

Yes, the entire internet. The main problem is not some stuff destroying the local machine but malware that acts as a botnet node or something even more sinister. And the damage that can be done this way goes far beyond that single upgrade resistant user.

11 minutes ago, dr_st said:

Not even XP past SP1 has any vulnerability than can be exploited in a completely passive way. It's all due to user actions.

Are you sure? Do you know every vulnerability of the system? The real danger comes from vulnerabilities that aren't known yet!

11 minutes ago, dr_st said:

This is also true. What pisses me off is that a lot of them went the lazy route and dropped Vista support at the same time, years ago. But can't blame them, Microsoft did the same.

Unlike XP which is quite lacking on its API side and may not support any software using more modern features, breaking Vista is a lot harder - I guess the main reason here is lack of machines to test on and generally irrelevant user share.

1 hour ago, Murdoch said:

Good times. I have often described Mac OS as a snake eating it's own tail. It is so obsessed with simplicity that it is making things complicated again.

Yes, indeed - it's forcing me to jump through hoops all too often because it treats its users as idiots that cannot think for themselves.

1 hour ago, Murdoch said:

 And yet Windows has a reputation for viruses and Macs still have a reputation for being immune to viruses in spite of the fact that the worst case of infection I have seen in the last three years was a Mac. Could not do a thing without getting hammered with ads. Even got shell scripts into the system directory.

Although I never caught malware on my work Mac I also didn't on my Windows PC - All infected stuff I have ever seen came from questionable sources - and I'd never think about running this software - if I get something with a fishy installer I'd rather delete it right away.

1 hour ago, Murdoch said:

People also claim they are best for photography and design work. That might have been true twenty years ago. But now all the major design apps are identical on both platforms. Invest in a decent screen and you have a design experience almost as good if not identical to a Mac for a considerably smaller price I would wager.

I use the Mac as a software development platform, but I cannot say I find the performance acceptable in any way. It's slow as shit, both due to the inefficient tools and the underpowered CPU in a notebook case where it tends to get hot quickly. Using such systems for demanding professional work isn't going to cut it, you got to buy Apple's totally overpriced high end solutions for that, where you can buy a true monster PC for the same amount of money.

@printz

Ubuntu-based is probably still the best bet for someone who doesn't have a prior *NIX background, but pick one of the variants that uses an interface that isn't a steaming pile; last I checked mainline Ubuntu (like a lot of distros) defaults to GNOME which is godawful.  My personal vote goes to LUbuntu (LXDE) but XUbuntu (XFCE) is good too.  KUbuntu (KDE) is a decent interface but bloated, might be okay for more powerful systems if you like the pointless glitz of it for some reason.  Though I've personally been using Peppermint (another LXDE-based variant which, as far as I can tell, is based directly on Ubuntu rather than on Mint as the name might imply).

Support for proprietary "Linux native" games is hit or miss as you imagine.  I've had some work with no problem, some work only after I figured out which additional libraries I needed to install (with the distro's own packaging system, that's usually figured out automatically, but GOG releases don't use that so you're given cryptic error messages to the console and left on your own) and some I still didn't figure out how to fix, not that I necessarily tried very hard.  Likewise WINE is really good for the things it's really good for, but some stuff just doesn't work at all and their compatibility report site is kind of user-hostile.

For someone who's really looking to get into deeper *NIX stuff and the original spirit of GNU/Linux I'd probably recommend something other than the Ubuntu lineage, though, but that's kind of going on a tangent.  But I will say that anyone who has the whole "Linux security" thing in mind should remember that part of that comes from using a pool of officially vetted packages from the distro, and when you start installing third-party, and especially proprietary third-party stuff, you're entering the jungle.  Even on Windows a lot of the problems aren't so much the system itself as the programs running on it.

12 hours ago, pc234 said:

When it is out of service i will not care!!!!!!!

thog don't caare?

23 minutes ago, ETTiNGRiNDER said:

Ubuntu-based is probably still the best bet for someone who doesn't have a prior *NIX background, but pick one of the variants that uses an interface that isn't a steaming pile

I don't understand the hate for the flagship Ubuntu user interface -- the one with the taskbar with square buttons on the left. It's familiar enough both to Windows and macOS users, and all the windowing features work seamlessly; it just feels professional enough to me. Or did they recently change from the dock/taskbar UI to something less intuitive?

I like Xubuntu (Xfce) for weaker computers, but I find its UI actually less polished.

Kubuntu (KDE) is not bad either, it feels more solid than Xubuntu actually. Still not polished, it looks more like a scientific lab to me, but maybe this is the point.

@Graf Zahl I'm not going to keep infected laptop running online. I hope HDD formatting and clean Win XP reinstall would help. I have all needed/wanted software, drivers, games burned to discs. All i do is browsing internet, downloading stuff, playing games. Last time i had problems was in 2009. And how you can be sure that Windows 10 can't be hijacked? Since it gets so popular, it should be main target for hackers. I don't think that someone would bother now to hack abandoned OS.

2 hours ago, Murdoch said:

I concur with Graf. Running XP in this day and age in any way other than an offline legacy machine is insanity. I do not know any mission critical software that will still allow installations on XP. You might have a semi-up to date copy of say Chrome or Firefox that still loads most sites. I hope you have your installers archived for when you drive fails because finding them again might be tricky. And when your motherboard goes, game over. Also Avast is kind of crap. I have seen it miss a few infections here and there, and it's a bit of a resource hog too. You seem to think you can "see" every security intrusion. Not every security compromise will make it's presence obvious, though I do agree common sense and smart practices are more important than anti-virus itself. I hope for your sake at least you do not do online banking on that machine. 

I use New Moon browser (fork of old Firefox version).

Avast 5.0.594 from 2010 is easy on resources and still gets updates for engine and virus definitions.

I don't do online banking at all.

I don't like the floating taskbar design. It feels nasty. Almost as bad as Mac's. I prefer Debian; you can install Cinnamon and have a neat user interface.

15 minutes ago, Loud Silence said:

@Graf Zahl And how you can be sure that Windows 10 can't be hijacked? Since it gets so popular, it should be main target for hackers. I don't think that someone would bother now to hack abandoned OS. 

For the simple reason that it's a lot easier to hijack 100 of 1000 machines running XP than it is to hijack 100 of 1000000 machines running Windows 10.

Have you heard of the recent DDoS attack on Wikipedia? From what I read they specifically targeted IoT devices with poorly managed updates. Despite a relatively low number they were far, far easier to hijack than a modern patched up Windows 10 machine. Consider your XP machine as the same level of vulnerability.

15 minutes ago, Loud Silence said:

I use New Moon browser (fork of old Firefox version).

Avast 5.0.594 from 2010 is easy on resources and still gets updates for engine and virus definitions.

I don't do online banking at all. 

Ouch! So you are running a 10 year old antivirus and hope it is effective against more modern attacks? Do you really believe that the virus definition file is all there is that needs updating? Modern threats need more up to date code.