I think it’s kismet. On the day that Microsoft announced it had installed Win10 on 800 million devices (yep, even refrigerators!), I went the other wa
[See the full post at: They’ll have to pry Win7 from my cold, clutched claws – Seven Semper Fi]
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Patch reliability is unclear. Unless you have an immediate, pressing need to install a specific patch, don't do it. |
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They’ll have to pry Win7 from my cold, clutched claws – Seven Semper Fi
- This topic has 94 replies, 47 voices, and was last updated 6 years, 1 month ago.
AuthorViewing 41 reply threadsAuthor-
Why Office 2013? In my experience, 2013 was extremely unstable compared to both 2010 and 2016, at least with respect to Excel. It would crash and/or lock up arbitrarily. Neither of these problems exist on my Windows 7 machine with Office 2010, or on my Windows 10 machine with Office 365 (which is 2016 under the covers), but it was a huge problem with Office 2013 on my other Windows 7 machine.
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Interesting question. I liked Office 2010 – and hated 2013’s increasing reliance on the ribbon. At the same time, I wanted to come up with as mainstream a setup as practical. Office 2016 came along after this machine shipped.
Not sure if I can still dig up the installation file for Office 2010. But 2016 is easy.
Any other opinions? I’m trying to put together something that resembles the configuration on the, uh, other 800 million machines.
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Outlook 365 (post-Office 2019) has a new opt-in UI that is much less ribbon-y, and totally customizable so you can have exactly the commands you want, in the order you want…. just like the Office 2003 days.
The other Office apps don’t have this new UI yet, but if it’s a sign of things to come, then that may be a path forward in the years ahead.
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I also like 2010 better. It’s easier to read on the screen. For some reason known only to the wizards of Redmond, they backtracked from years of making visuals more three dimensional to flattening and reducing everything to where you can hardly see icons or instructions. Yes, I’m older. But at home I use 2010 and it’s much more user-friendly. (By the way, if you’re a ribbon-hider like me, you’ll be glad to know that a lot of the old keyboard shortcuts still work in newer versions of Windows and Office.)
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I’m trying to put together something that resembles the configuration on the, uh, other 800 million machines.
Wrong OS then. 😕
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I like to do the SSD swap before the configuration, updates, and software installs – might as well take advantage of the speed from the get-go!
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I thought about getting an SSD, then asked myself if most of the “normal” Win7 users I know have SSDs.
I don’t think they’re that common, but could well be wrong.
I could also add memory and put in a better graphics card. But again, I don’t know if that’s realistically how the other 800 million lives.
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Might be a lot more than you think. My current build from around 2014 has two of them and there were becoming reasonably common then
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They have their own sources of decay. The main difference is that HDDs usually show bad sectors before they die. SSDs fail all in one stroke. Very disconcerting if you don’t already have a good recent data backup.
-- rc primak
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The only reason machines like this won’t remain eminently usable for another 10 years is the fact that web developers have collectively gone out of their minds.
The memory and CPU requirements for the average web page keeps going up, up, up… much, much faster than any other application or operating system we use. And tons of desktop application developers are now building their software on top of this heavy stack of web technologies.
On my machine right now, I’ve got:
Fusion 360…. Written in C++. 76 MB. pretty good.
Outlook 365 …. Written in C++. 130 MB. for what it’s doing, no problem.
Askwoody …. Written with basic web technology. 200 MB. hmmm.
Youtube …. written with more advanced web technology. 400 MB. too much.
Slack …. written with advanced web technology, but packaged as a desktop app. 600 MB. For a chat program? Come -on-. Even the entirety of Windows Vista needed less RAM.
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I mean I get that they want to make sure their application runs on all platforms. But if that’s an issue, why not just write their programs in Java? Java 8 launches much faster than their predecessors, uses far less memory than an application in a browser, and the speed is fairly on par with C++ programs.
I’d be okay with this kind of thing if they allowed third-party clients to exist, but most don’t.
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Older programs have a core that may date back to the 80s, well before Java or JavaScript existed. So the core would need to be rewritten, not an easy task nor cheap. Also, many dev houses in the 90 & 00’s locked themselves into MS infrastructure and would have a great deal of difficulty disentangling their products even if they wanted.
I agree, devs should OS agnostic whenever possible so that their code is not tied to the whims of a third party as much as some Windows applications are tied to Windows.
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We’re locked in to WordPress…. Moving to something else (or growing our own low overhead site) would be a monumental – and expensive, and unstable – task.
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You all have been doing a remarkably fine job. I have no complaints in terms of the latest incarnations of the forum — other than one! My one complaint is that, whenever I log in, I get taken to the home page, instead of to the page which I was viewing. This is a minor issue.
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Such is the nature of development. More capable hardware means software will be developed that needs it, even for the same tasks as before.
Windows 3.0, the first version I used, came on four 3.5″ floppies, and we all wondered how an OS could possibly be that huge. MS-DOS was the standard OS, and it was tiny compared to Windows. At that time, I had a single 40MB hard drive, and I was amazed that something so massively huge could even exist. I was used to 177KB floppies from the Commodore world; the 1.44MB and 1.2MB floppies from the PC world were already amazing works of technology at that time for me. 40 whole megabytes? Whatever could I find to fill all of THAT up??
I had 4
GBMB of RAM in that machine, and people asked me why I needed so much. With its Trident SVGA with 1MB onboard and its 386-33 CPU, it was a fast PC. Not barn-blazing fast (that would have been the 486-33), but still quite quick.The orders of magnitude of change in primary/secondary storage boggles the mind. Could 1990 me have even understood what a terabyte of storage means, intuitively? What would I have thought if I had been told that one could purchase a 3 TB hard drive for under a hundred dollars? My 40MB drive cost me three hundred, not including the MFM controller card, and that was in 1990 dollars. As I understand, I’d gotten it cheap in terms of the prevailing prices!
Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)There was a time when programming was an art form and the true wizards reveled in how compact their code could be while still extracting the most performance possible from any given section of code.
Along the way things changed.
Now we are at a point where the least talented humans (I would not insult real programmers by using that term here), billed out at attractively low cost but easily not even worth that price, are writing all the code we are saddled with today. Poorly tested and often passed through a code expander so the buffoon can bill out more lines of code, is it any wonder everything performs worse, with less stability, and shrinking features?
Add to that the amazing trend of running applications in a web browser – the absolute worst interface platform possible for robust applications. Simply google that and read the many serious white papers explaining this in more detail if you question it.
So, the result…
Slow, cr***y, unstable applications that barely work, maybe, if you’re lucky.
I do remember when I enjoyed being a computer professional. Those days are now long gone and I dread having to recommend anything to my clients because there are no longer any good choices. Instead we must deal with barely passable solutions that then require us to be available to continuously fix things that should work, should stay configured, and mostly shouldn’t change after being set up.
Way to go Woody, it’s so nice to come your site this morning and see WIN 7 in the headline and in a positive way. I’ve had Win 7 since 2012 and have not had any problems at all with it. So I really agree with your headline!
I also have an old 2003 IBM Thinkpad T40 with Win XP Pro that still works great. My current project is a 2006 Sony VAIO that I just recently upgraded with a new Samsung 250 GB 860 EVO SSD and Linux Mint Cinnamon 19.1. It runs great too.
Being 20 something in the 70's was so much better than being 70 something in the insane 20'sYou could run Windows-only programs, such as Photoshop, on the Windows machine offline and run a different OS on your main machine. You can share files using a USB drive or SD card.
I came up with this idea myself this morning. I want to eventually switch to Linux Mint, but I have at least one program I cannot let go of. I have a smaller desktop which has not been used since I ditched Windows 10. Since that PC was running stable when I created the last disk image for it, I could restore it to the Windows 10 (1803) disk image, take it offline permanently with no more updates, and convert my primary PC to Linux. That way, I could do all my online activities on a Linux machine and use my offline Windows machine for special projects requiring Windows and offline games as an HTPC. With that being said, I have everything planned out, but I’m not going to do this just yet until that time comes.
I am no longer an active member of the forums.
Upgrade to an SSD and the ThinkCentre will be transformed!
I’ve recently bought a refurbished Thinkpad T540p , that’s getting upgraded to Windows 7 next week…
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I was on w7 but bowing to peer pressure I transfered to the all singing/dancing (promoted) w10.
Bad mistake – w10 did not have the sense and reason of W7 – I hated it.
So I went back to w7 and more than made my day being rid of the abomination of w10.
Not looking forward to 2020 and demise of W7.
( I still have original disc for w98 which surely now is that old it is incurruptable and no doubt superior to w10.)
hfp
Still running a few Win 7 systems here, on Core2Duo CPU’s. Adding an SSD reduces boot times by at least an order of magnitude. Best. Upgrade. Ever! One system acts as a DVR server with NextPVR software, recording to a 2TB WD Green Drive. The others act as clients for NextPVR, stationed near other TV’s in the house. With the fiasco that is Windows 10, I plan to keep these things running on Windows 7 until they just won’t boot any longer. 🙂
I’m planning on continuing to use Win7 PC’s well beyond the update expiration. When I read of the complexities of the Win 10 version updates and the problems…no thanks. The updates seem to be causing users way more headaches than malware.
OTOH..I might follow Woody’s lead and get a cheapo to test my hypotheses that it’s just not worth the hassle.
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“Out of my cold, clutched claws…” indeed! That was one possible way it was going to be with my old Win 7 PC, until very, very recently. Alas! Fate has intervened now and my dilemma of what to do after next January has been resolved for me: my OS, Windows 7 Pro, SP1 x64 is dying. Gracefully, as ever, so even now it has let me get all of my data out in a final backup.
In a way, I am glad, because the decision has been made for me and now the path is wide-open for bringing the 71/2 year-old PC back to life as a Linux (Mint) machine, with the old HD replaced with a 1 TB SSD (as I’ve decided after asking, and getting, free and generous advice here at Woody’s as to how to do this). For many years I have been wanting to have a Linux machine, but always had the choice of using those of others, by remote login, or directly, when visiting some research lab, so there was no pressure to do something about it – and no good options I could see for buying another PC with Linux pre-installed (being too squeamish about installing it in dual boot or replacing Windows with it myself, something that, at long last, I’m going to have to do anyways).
How this sad situation came about was that the Windows 7 OS in my HP Pavilion dv6, ca. 2011, was left in critical condition following the installation of last month’s patches (Office 2010 and the MSRT), a few days ago: the overt symptom is the loss or corruption of my profile, so now I only have access to a temporary Desktop with very limited capabilities at my disposal. Attempts to return things to normal have not been successful. I do not believe the patches caused this, but that something went terminally wrong during the patching operation itself. Probably something that, sooner or later, was going to happen anyways. Win 7 came pre-installed, so I have no install disk, and returning the machine to its original state would, even if successful, wipe out two expensive compilers (Fortran 90+ and C++) plus several other useful applications I need for my work. Luckily, I also have a new-ish Mac with all I need also installed on it, so I can keep going regardless. But a second, Linux, machine will make some of my work easier, because I would be able to develop software with executables in native Linux binary, a thing that I have been needing and making do, using awkward roundabout ways, for years now.
And so, it’s finally curtains for you, and Requiescat In Pacem, my old Win 7 friend! It’s been a long and remarkable ride we’ve had together, and now your work is done.
Group B (soon to be Group L) Windows 7 Pro, SP1, x64, I-7 “sandy bridge” CPU.
Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).
MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
macOS Monterey; browsers: Waterfox "Current", Vivaldi and (now and then) Chrome; security apps. Intego AV5 users thanked author for this post.
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No, no evidence at the time that those were bad patches (already OKed for several days in the Master Patch List, and no significant problems reported until then, except for a few conflicts with some specific applications I do not use), and no one else had reported a similar problem to mine, by then, or has by now, after probably many people have already applied the same patches. It must have been caused by some conflict in the software that was already installed at the time of the fatal patching. Or some not obvious hardware problem, something I certainly do not wish for, or hope that, if such is the case, it is confined to the HD I intend to replace with an SSD. We’ll see.
Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).
MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
macOS Monterey; browsers: Waterfox "Current", Vivaldi and (now and then) Chrome; security apps. Intego AV1 user thanked author for this post.
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The only reason machines like this won’t remain eminently usable for another 10 years is the fact that web developers have collectively gone out of their minds.
You assume that everyone takes a computer on the internet. I contend that a computer is usable for many years beyond the end of its Windows patching, as long as it is not taken on the internet.
I have a computer running Win 2K from 2004 off the internet and it is still usable. Among some of the programs I still use, is an old free program to rip music CDs so I can put tracks on our mp3 players.
We have two XP computers (one I rescued when the owner was going to throw it away) from 2004 and the other from 2009. Both are still very useful and we have no intention of e-cycling them. My husband has a circa 1997 HP printer attached to the one XP and prints labels from databases stored on USB sticks. He prefers using this to his Win 7 computer and wifi printer.
Got coffee?
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“I contend that a computer is usable for many years beyond the end of its Windows patching, as long as it is not taken on the internet.”
Absolutely. The shop I work at is still using older versions of Windows. Our lathe and mill departments are running their Cad cam programs on Vista and XP machines. Our inspection dept. has multiple XP machines along with a one lone Pentium machine still using W98, soley for one program that is on it. The rest are part of a small fleet of Dell Core Duo machines.
We do have one new machine out in the shop. A Kaby Lake machine running W7. That one has internet access.
The stuff just works. We have zero reason to spend the capitol for upgrades we don’t need. Software nor hardware. Those Dell machines and the software installed on them are like the Energizer Rabbit. They just keep going and going…
I’m using 7 still as my primary machine, and plan to only change when absolutely FORCED to do so. In which case I’ll likely move to Linux Mint or whatever the current flavour is, and keep my W7 for offline playing around and gaming.
I go to work, I come home, switch my PC on, browse a bit, game a bit, do whatever I need to do, office, whatever else, update it when ‘I’ want to, and it all works! Lovely and smooth, no stress, no hidden “features” causing bother, total control of updates, doesn’t try to second guess me, act like a ****** phone with stupid “apps”, no settings reverting without my knowledge or anything else. I love it!
I’m using W7 with Classic Shell for the single-column programs menu (like XP) and Folder Options X, that allows me to order my files and folders exactly how I want.
I’ve been able to customise literally everything I’ve needed to. It really boggles my mind why they’d ever expect me to upgrade to 10, where everything is out of my hands, and it will be as if I’m using someone else’s PC, or constant stress and messing around to keep everything in order.
It’s called a PERSONAL COMPUTER for a reason.
The guy who keeps my 5 year old HP ZBook 17 humming along, (Win 7 Pro, x64 SP1, i7-4700 Haswell MQ CPU, 8 GB) suggested to me, after the most recent service a couple of months back, that I consider installing an SSD.
Just do it. I promise that you’ll be amazed at how it brings new life to the laptop. Image your existing disk, swap in the new SSD, restore the image to the new SSD. Be astounded at how fast it boots afterwards. 🙂
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Windows 7 does just what I want it to, when I want it to, in the ways I want it to…
W10 isn’t configurable to do the same thing.
Hard to give up something that works well, for something that won’t do what I want it to do, even if the whole update roller coaster and fun ride, sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, was evened out. There are times that steady and dependable are good qualities to look for in an operating system.
Non-techy Win 10 Pro and Linux Mint experimenter
Interesting article and discussion, thanks all!
I have two desktops, both Windows 7×64 Home, one used for browsing and gaming, the other for browsing and voluntary work through Office 2010 (I’m a retired home user). The machines are not directly connected and they both work well using MSE in the background and manual MBAM version 2.x for weekly or twice weekly scans.
I hate the idea of having to move on to Windows 10 which seems to offer me nothing advantageous and plenty of downsides in terms of loss of control and privacy – as well as very possibly a reduction in gaming reliability given that I have zero problems with my online MMORPGs compared to many running “state of the art” machines including Windows 10. Incidentally, I operate on a strictly “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” approach to drivers so my sound and graphics drivers are several years old and run everything flawlessly.
My current thinking remains to review the situation in about September with a view to probably replacing my gaming machine with a new superior-specced desktop running Windows 10, and then next year probably replacing the Office machine either with my existing gaming machine upgraded to Windows 10 or else a Chromebook.
A move to Linux is out of the question gaming-wise, as is a laptop or other device for gaming although the idea behind the Chromebook as the second machine is partly that it would be all my computer-phobic wife would need for browsing and internet shopping if she should happen to be left on her own some day.
I think last time I looked at alternatives to MSE I was favoring Emsisoft although I remain open to suggestions in that respect. I certainly won’t feel under any pressure to finalise any machine changes until at least well into the first quarter of 2020, but I shall follow the discussions that take place between now and then with interest. In particular, I’m not interested in getting a new operating system that offers inferior reliability and privacy in practice just to replace a fully working system that has only a theoretical risk of security issues. I don’t, incidentally, carry out any form of internet banking or online monitoring of investments and pensions etc. I chatted over coffee the other week with a friend who said he had several friends who worked in banking and not a single one of them would have anything to do with online banking!
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If one of the MMOs is WoW, I can report that it works shockingly well with Linux.
I chatted over coffee the other week with a friend who said he had several friends who worked in banking and not a single one of them would have anything to do with online banking!
They may understand banking, but that doesn’t mean they necessarily understand computers. They may get customers coming in every day requesting help after they’ve have had bad things happen because they had easy-to-guess passwords, or they got phished, or they in some other way contributed to having their accounts compromised, and that could easily color a bank employees’ impression of online banking in a way that those of us that do not work in banking never could. That’s not to say they don’t know something the rest of us don’t… only that simply working in a bank doesn’t necessarily mean they get the full picture.
The thing that a lot of people may not immediately grasp is that just because you do not do online banking, it doesn’t mean that someone won’t try to do online banking in your name at your bank. If you don’t sign up for it and associate the account with a well-protected, strong password, it doesn’t mean that someone else out there won’t take the opportunity to do a little identity theft and use some stolen info about you to register an online account in your name, but with a password you don’t know. That’s not to say they could not use the same strategy to try to compromise your account and get the password reset, but you’re more likely to notice it, I think, if you are in the loop than if you’re out. At the very least, you’d have an email address associated with it, and that should tell you if anyone’s changed your password or anything else important. It also lets you see your statement anytime you wish, which means you’d be more likely to spot something fishy now rather than in up to a month, when your paper one comes in the mail.
Assuming that not doing online banking means your account isn’t vulnerable isn’t the case, and I think a lot of people assume that it is. You’d have to have an entire bank that offers no online banking services whatsoever in order to have that particular attack vector closed. I don’t know of any of them that go that far, but if there is a demand for it, it probably exists somewhere. The odds of it having a local branch (which you would need more than ever without any online banking available) are pretty slim, but it is possible to do banking by old-fashioned snail mail, if that’s your thing. Old-fashioned, unencryptable snail-mail!
The idea of maintaining a presence to prevent someone else from impersonating you is the same argument some have used regarding social media presence. Better, they say, to have a lackluster Facebook page that you never use than to not have one at all and let someone else put one up in your name in order to make you look bad. If I cared at all about what is on Facebook, I might be inclined to put up a placeholder account just for that purpose, but from what I understand, Facebook, etc., may remove a profile if it’s not ever updated or accessed, and I’m definitely not going to actually participate in that whole thing. Let someone impersonate me all they wish; it will only fool people who don’t know me. Those that do know I would never use anything like Facebook. Future employers or the like who think Facebook matters… well, I guess it’s just as well that we part ways sooner than later.
Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11) -
My main rig is a Sky Lake i5-6500 machine running W7. It has 16 Gb of ram and an SDD. With triple monitors running Display Fusion and Classic Shell. It can do double duty as a DVR with Media Center and my Silicon Dust TV tuner. I have it configured, tweaked and customized to suit me.
I fully plan on using it to the b***** end.
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I admit I’m now working to keep ALL my options open – and as stable, usable, and locked down as I can:
1.) Windows 7 Pro which is still my favorite at the moment. I’ll hold on to it as long as I can – even if it ends up being for offline use of legacy software & hardware after 2020 EOL.
2) Linux Mint which I definitely like – though I’m not done climbing the Linux learning curve.
3) And then there is Windows 10 Pro. (Oh, no Mr. Bill…)
I recently upgraded (?!) to 1809 from 1709 using an offline ISO and it went smoothly. After having “clear-cut” much of the forest of wiz-bang, useless-to-me apps and features, I’m seeing a few more things to like than I thought I would. I’m still in the midst of working through modifications to Group Policy, Task Scheduler and the byzantine labyrinths of the “Settings” and “Control Panel” mess. We’ll see. Too soon to tell….
I feel it never hurts to have irons in multiple fires, eh?
Win10 Pro x64 22H2, Win10 Home 22H2, Linux Mint + a cat with 'tortitude'.
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With a few exceptions around the edges, you don’t need Control Panel for anything in 1809. At this point it’s better to just ignore it and learn the new stuff.
The only things that haven’t been moved over are:
- Bitlocker
- Storage Spaces
- File History
- Credential Manager
- Work Folders
- Reliability Monitor
and there are some more advanced AutoPlay settings that are only in the Control Panel UI… just in case you want to configure what happens if you play that bootleg Super Video CD you bought in Hong Kong 20 years ago.
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Thanks. I’m still drilling down in the Settings interface. To my taste though, it’s a bit like peeling an onion to get to some of the settings. They strike me as buried and not efficiently laid out – as if they’re intentionally obfuscated to provide a clean look for the average user, keeping them from easily tinkering, while making it more of an easter egg hunt for the technical user. I’m sure once I find my way around, I will be peeling the onion a bit faster. 😉
The appearance of simplicity for the average user, yet an ergonomic and effiency straight-jacket for the more technically inclined? A lot of the Windows 8/8.1/10 design choices seem to fall into this category for me. I don’t care much for the trade-off. It’s why I use Open-Shell Menu instead of the standard Start menu. Way more efficient (faster, easier) to organize things and to get to things. “To each their own” I suppose – until MS removes the option?
Win10 Pro x64 22H2, Win10 Home 22H2, Linux Mint + a cat with 'tortitude'.
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This will be lengthy, for which I apologize. I also realize that a business environment is quite different from a home network. That being said, here goes:
I’ve dual-booted since the late 20th century, on every PC/laptop. For the most part, dual installations of the same OS. It also facilitates such options as giving Linux a try (several times), and tinkering extensively with Windows, deep-diving into the registry and such. If I got one side of my dual-boot un-bootable, I could boot into the other side and do repair work from there quite often. In worst case scenarios, I would restore my latest drive image and jump back in. I’ve always made frequent drive images, which was a bit tedious using CD’s, but not as tedious as re-installing everything. These days Task Scheduler does it for me, creating images on a dedicated internal HDD, which I copy periodically to my NAS and also to external HDD’s.
Such a regimen makes it easy to try new OS’s, such as Linux, and new iterations of Windows on exactly the same hardware, and make comparisons of performance, stability, and so forth. I started this with Windows 95, and have been doing it ever since; 2K pro, XP Pro, (skipped Vista), Windows 7, 8, 8.1 and 10. I stayed with XP long after I had Windows 7 on the other side of my dual-boot. In the early Windows 7 days I had two DIY machines that were essentially identical, same motherboard (Intel), same CPU, same RAM, same HDD’s. One was my sacrificial lamb, the other was my daily driver. Unfortunately, they were lost in a house fire, but my drive images were not. I only lost the hardware.
Since drive imaging was an essential part of my PC habits, I restructured Windows in order to make it more convenient and less tedious for getting elbow deep into Windows core, more often than not making a real mess of things. By dividing the HDD’s into small partitions for the OS and User folders, a larger partition for Program Files, and another partition for downloads of various utilities and other executables, if I pooched Windows, that was the only partition I had to restore; the others were untouched by my shenanigans.
I tried Windows 8, found StartIsBack to get my Windows 7 Start Menu, and also found no real reason to upgrade. I gave it a go on my desktop and my laptop, but found no real improvement over my optimized Windows 7. Partitioning out the OS, etc. and also utliizing two separate HDD’s to divide those partitions, performance was noticably enhanced. Reading from two HDD’s simultaneously makes things jump onto the monitor.
Next I tried 8.1, and found it equal to Windows 7 in performance, using my same techniques of partitioning out the installation. All of this is pretty much chronicled in Windows Secrets Lounge, and will be available once the whale is swallowed. The point of all the rambling up to here is that I’ve made it all the way to Windows 10 1809 Build 17763.348 while simultaneously being able to compare each new iteration of Windows to my preferred iteration directly, on exactly the same hardware.
I haven’t had the multitude of problems that I’ve read about with Windows 10. I’ve had very minor glitches here and there, but I have yet to experience a BSOD. I’ve had the “Something went wrong, restarting…” a couple of times, but the restart was always successful, and I’ve been able to keep right on trucking. I continue to tinker with Windows innards, and have created many problems of my own, but they can’t be blamed on Windows 10, and are easily corrected by restoring a drive image and going at it again until I get it right.
I still do contract work occasionally (not IT, I’m a geologist) for the company from which I semi-retired 16 years ago. It’s a multi-national company, thousands of desktops/laptops all running Windows 7 Enterprise and using IE 11. They have their own cloud, and are locked down tight. When I’m on a project, I have to do daily updates and email log files. I use my Dell Latitude E5420 running Windows 10 over WiFi rather than logging into one of the Windows 7 PC’s available in the office, even though their hardware is newer.
In my experience, which is comparing the different iterations on exactly the same hardware, Windows 10 is hands down a much more nimble and reliable platform than Windows 7. I have the telemetry disabled. I don’t try to control updates/upgrades, just let it flow. I never tried to control updates with Windows 7, either. I have weekly drive images via Task Scheduler, so if anything should go awry, I can get back to where I was before in about 6 minutes. The first issue of 1809 didn’t cause me the same problems I read about, but when Microsoft pulled it, I restored a drive image back to 1803. When 1809 was re-released, I used the MCT to upgrade. I’m still running without incident. I’m now up to StartIsBack++ 2.7.2, which looks just like Windows 7 and a touch of XP with flyout menus from Start Menu folders.
I have a Dell Latitude D800 (circa 2003) which still runs Windows 7, but it’s only of sentimental value; I did a lot of programming using that laptop when it was running Windows XP Pro.Always create a fresh drive image before making system changes/Windows updates; you may need to start over!We all have our own reasons for doing the things that we do with our systems; we don't need anyone's approval, and we don't all have to do the same things.We were all once "Average Users".1 user thanked author for this post.
I’d have gone looking for a Windows 8.1 Pro license for it myself. Windows 8.1 is the last and (caveat: with tweaking) best of the perpetually-licensed Windows systems. Ya just gotta know the tweaks.
With “not the newest” Windows OS, you might worry when you do something new with Windows 8.1 – i.e., buy new hardware or expect new software to work. But… In recent history, it’s not been a practical problem at all;. For example, my experience:
– Bought a nVidia Quadro workstation graphics card. Works beautifully. Gets driver updates.
– Bought an Anker Uspeed PCI-E USB 3.0 card. Easy install, flawless operation.
– Bought an 8 GB Western Digital Mybook USB drive. No driver needed, works great.
– Bought a Linksys wifi adapter, no driver needed, worked great.
– Bought a Hauppage dual TV tuner dongle. Works like a charm.
– Bought a cheap Zexmte bluetooth adapter. Pairs with brand new Sony headphones.
– Runs the latest versions of a whole bunch of development tools.
– Runs the latest Malwarebytes.
– Makes a VPN connection with new DLink router and also a corporate portal.
– Runs continuously for months without crash or glitch.
So far I’ve only encountered one application I wanted to run that balked at not being on Windows 10 but I found an easy workaround for that and it runs just fine. The trend of more and more things becoming incompatible will probably continue, but so far it’s sure hard to complain about a stable, performant operating system that’s most decidedly NOT perpetually in beta.
And it’s newer than Windows 7, with a later end-of-support date.
-Noel
We have very expensive inventory stock programs that will not run on Windows 10. Only Win7, can run this software. There are serious compatability issues with Win10, will keep using Windows 7 for many more years until we can find good software that can even come close to what we have now. Another thing we don’t like about Win10 is that you can’t personalize as much as with Win7. Just one example, you can no longer go to personalize sounds and select your favorite Logon and Logoff or Windows startup sounds like in Win7, they are gone!! Microsoft engineers thought that was not necessary, who are they to tell me how I should personalize my PC? I like to hear sounds when my PC starts up, not silence like apple. Startup sounds were a hallmark of microsoft in the early days. There are many applications in Win10 that are completely useless, disabled hackable One Drive, don’t need Cortana, don’t need microsoft to display the news, weather, or pictures when I press the start button. I can go to the news or weather website that I want, thank-you. There isn’t even the handy analog clock gadget that we use on all our Win7 machines. The Win10 clock display is so small that we can barely see it. Even the USER ACCOUNT picture is very small you can’t even tell what it is. I just want Win10 to work like Win7. Win10 navigation to get to an application like settings, and there are several types of settings for that matter, are difficult to find, takes a LOT MORE MOUSE CLICKING, through all the menues and sub-menues, where you can no longer find what logically previous Windows versions had. Of course updating Win10 every 6months is a nightmare. All our Win10 machines literally get uplugged from the internet for 4 months at a time, then we plug them back on for ONE day to update Defender, then keep those PCs offline to avoid all the updating headaches and the crashes never had that with Win7. Only do feature update Win10 once year, skip the 6 month routine, for the rest of the time we block feature updates. We can’t even choose to set “Check for updates but let me chose whether to download and install them.” Never had those problems with Win7. We used to trust Microsoft for updating but no longer. Finally, we noticed that Win10 is constantly using large amout bandwidth for unknown reasons. Even if we don’t allow PCs to share updates with others online, the Resource Monitor shows microsoft programs running, sending and receiving without stopping. Wearing out our HDDs at microsoft’s pleasure. Windows 7 on the other hand, will pause many times during the day and you may get the occasional spike here and there on the internet connection but remains mostly inactive if you are not browsing. Win10 is definitely using our paid bandwidth for their own use for something that I can only guess at.
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The real world speaks.
It will take a lot more such voices to break through the wall of self-congratulation that surrounds Microsoft and its current management.
1 user thanked author for this post.
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Another thing we don’t like about Win10 is that you can’t personalize as much as with Win7. Just one example, you can no longer go to personalize sounds and select your favorite Logon and Logoff or Windows startup sounds like in Win7, they are gone!! Microsoft engineers thought that was not necessary, who are they to tell me how I should personalize my PC? I like to hear sounds when my PC starts up, not silence like apple.
Do you mean these sounds?:
I’ve no idea why but MS just hid them from view.
Try this:
(Difficulty level – Easy / Time – Couple of minutes)1. Copy/paste the following into Notepad and save as something like sounds-back-again.reg (not sounds-back-again.reg.txt).
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 ; Sounds - Windows startup, logon, logoff sounds - ON ; Tested with Windows 10 version 1809 [HKEY_CURRENT_USERAppEventsEventLabelsNotification.Looping.Alarm] @="Alarm 1" "ExcludeFromCPL"=dword:00000000 [HKEY_CURRENT_USERAppEventsEventLabelsNotification.Looping.Alarm10] @="Alarm 10" "ExcludeFromCPL"=dword:00000000 [HKEY_CURRENT_USERAppEventsEventLabelsNotification.Looping.Alarm2] @="Alarm 2" "ExcludeFromCPL"=dword:00000000 [HKEY_CURRENT_USERAppEventsEventLabelsNotification.Looping.Alarm3] @="Alarm 3" "ExcludeFromCPL"=dword:00000000 [HKEY_CURRENT_USERAppEventsEventLabelsNotification.Looping.Alarm4] @="Alarm 4" "ExcludeFromCPL"=dword:00000000 [HKEY_CURRENT_USERAppEventsEventLabelsNotification.Looping.Alarm5] @="Alarm 5" "ExcludeFromCPL"=dword:00000000 [HKEY_CURRENT_USERAppEventsEventLabelsNotification.Looping.Alarm6] @="Alarm 6" "ExcludeFromCPL"=dword:00000000 [HKEY_CURRENT_USERAppEventsEventLabelsNotification.Looping.Alarm7] @="Alarm 7" "ExcludeFromCPL"=dword:00000000 [HKEY_CURRENT_USERAppEventsEventLabelsNotification.Looping.Alarm8] @="Alarm 8" "ExcludeFromCPL"=dword:00000000 [HKEY_CURRENT_USERAppEventsEventLabelsNotification.Looping.Alarm9] @="Alarm 9" "ExcludeFromCPL"=dword:00000000 [HKEY_CURRENT_USERAppEventsEventLabelsNotification.Looping.Call] @="Incoming Call Notification 1" "ExcludeFromCPL"=dword:00000000 [HKEY_CURRENT_USERAppEventsEventLabelsNotification.Looping.Call10] @="Incoming Call Notification 10" "ExcludeFromCPL"=dword:00000000 [HKEY_CURRENT_USERAppEventsEventLabelsNotification.Looping.Call2] @="Incoming Call Notification 2" "ExcludeFromCPL"=dword:00000000 [HKEY_CURRENT_USERAppEventsEventLabelsNotification.Looping.Call3] @="Incoming Call Notification 3" "ExcludeFromCPL"=dword:00000000 [HKEY_CURRENT_USERAppEventsEventLabelsNotification.Looping.Call4] @="Incoming Call Notification 4" "ExcludeFromCPL"=dword:00000000 [HKEY_CURRENT_USERAppEventsEventLabelsNotification.Looping.Call5] @="Incoming Call Notification 5" "ExcludeFromCPL"=dword:00000000 [HKEY_CURRENT_USERAppEventsEventLabelsNotification.Looping.Call6] @="Incoming Call Notification 6" "ExcludeFromCPL"=dword:00000000 [HKEY_CURRENT_USERAppEventsEventLabelsNotification.Looping.Call7] @="Incoming Call Notification 7" "ExcludeFromCPL"=dword:00000000 [HKEY_CURRENT_USERAppEventsEventLabelsNotification.Looping.Call8] @="Incoming Call Notification 8" "ExcludeFromCPL"=dword:00000000 [HKEY_CURRENT_USERAppEventsEventLabelsNotification.Looping.Call9] @="Incoming Call Notification 9" "ExcludeFromCPL"=dword:00000000 [HKEY_CURRENT_USERAppEventsEventLabelsSystemExit] @="Exit Windows" "ExcludeFromCPL"=dword:00000000 [HKEY_CURRENT_USERAppEventsEventLabelsWindowsLogoff] @="Windows Logoff" "ExcludeFromCPL"=dword:00000000 [HKEY_CURRENT_USERAppEventsEventLabelsWindowsLogon] @="Windows Logon" "ExcludeFromCPL"=dword:00000000 [HKEY_CURRENT_USERAppEventsEventLabelsWindowsUnlock] @="Windows Unlock" "ExcludeFromCPL"=dword:00000000
2. Double-click on the saved .REG file and accept the User Account Control prompt.
3. Click on the Yes button to dismiss the Are you sure you want to continue? prompt.
4. Click on the OK button to dismiss the message which appears.
That’s it – the new settings to re-enable logon, logoff and startup sounds (plus a few more) will take effect immediately.
Hope this helps…
2 users thanked author for this post.
I’m on 1803, does that first paragraph need to be included in the save Reg file? Also if it doesn’t work, is there a reversal?
The first line (i.e. Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00) *must* be included.
The second 2 lines *don’t* need to be included… they’re just comments. (As with AutoHotkey scripts, any text following a semi-colon [;] is treated as a comment. PowerShell uses a hash [#] character instead as a comment delimiter.) However, IMO it’s good practice to include them just in case the name of the .REG file doesn’t provide sufficient info about the file’s purpose.
Yes, it’s easy to reverse (and a good question… I should have mentioned this in my previous post).
1. Make a copy of your sounds-back-again.reg file and rename it to something like no-sounds-default.reg.
2. Open the no-sounds-default.reg file in Notepad and use Edit > Replace to replace every instance of dword:00000000 with dword:00000001.
3. Change the 2 comment lines to:
; Sounds - Windows startup, logon, logoff sounds - OFF (default) ; Tested with Windows 10 versions 1809, 1803
4. Save the file.
That’s it… you’ve created an undo .REG file (‘cos the DWORD value is just a toggle – 0 for YES/ON/ENABLE/SHOW and 1 for NO/OFF/DISABLE/HIDE).
(And I’ve tested both .REG files with Win 10 1803 now.)
Hope this helps…
2 users thanked author for this post.
Isn’t this a Windows 7 Thread. Isn’t this a little off-topic?
1 user thanked author for this post.
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I consider passing on helpful information to always be “on topic”. Ain’t that one of the points of this forum — to help people? It seems to me that one should balance between allowing either somewhat or glaringly “off topic” responses, versus whether or not such responses are actually helpful to others. Or perhaps the mods could move helpful yet “off topic” comments and responses to newly titled threads? Ah, whatever. All of the replies here in this present thread have been delightful to read.
1 user thanked author for this post.
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When I receive an “off topic” warning, I supply a link and direct people to follow the new discussion in its new location. So I start a thread in the appropriate forum, then post a link to the continuation of the discussion. This avoids conflating multiple topics or multiple OSes or OS versions into a single thread.
Letting multiple topics get jammed together into a single discussion thread confuses people and makes the original thread more difficult to follow.
-- rc primak
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