Woody’s Windows Watch: Sticking with Windows 7? You aren’t alone.

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If you plan on keeping Windows 7 beyond its expiry date, January of next year, you aren’t alone. Hundreds of millions of PCs will continue to use Win7
[See the full post at: Woody’s Windows Watch: Sticking with Windows 7? You aren’t alone.]

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FakeNinja, Elly, abbodi86, AlphaCharlie, SueW, Myst

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I have been holding off moving to WIN10 on my small office machine because I use some very specialized software which gets broken with each update in WIN10, requiring considerable manual repair time.  A rare case where there is absolutely no alternative.  Right now, I have the switch penciled in for early 2020 after the holidays.  Perhaps MS will extend WIN7 as they did XP, and perhaps the software issues will get fixed.  It will be nice to have all my machines on the same Windows version for the first time in literally decades.  🙂

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Hate to say it, but the chances of MS extending Win7 patches is nonexistent. Unless you can afford the considerable sum to get a volume license, you’re outta luck. And the Win10 patching frequency isn’t going to slow down either.

Your most stable solution? Find a way to do what you’re doing on the web. Then it doesn’t matter what system you’re using.

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I have been holding off moving to WIN10 on my small office machine because I use some very specialized software which gets broken with each update in WIN10, requiring considerable manual repair time.

Many big and small office machines are holding off removing Windows 7 deploying Windows 10 because it breaks the specialize software or does not work on Windows 10. Many are still using Windows Xp since the software does not work on Windows 7.

Find a way to do what you’re doing on the web. Then it doesn’t matter what system you’re using.

How can you do that? Several accounting software and document management are linked to other software that were written in Cobol from 1960 or other older code that will not work the web. This is one of the reason that Windows Xp is used since Cobol works well with it. Some XP are not connected to the web and just used for internal servers that do not connect to anything.

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woody

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Several accounting software and document management are linked to other software that were written in Cobol from 1960 or other older code that will not work the web.

Your luck that you have COBOL. Some are still using Fortran, COMTRAN and FLOW-MATIC. The contractors gets $4K for each hour spent working or maintenance these systems. The government and companies are saving big money since these systems can not be hacked by outside people and inside people are to clueless to do anything with it other than what was shown to them.

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Is there a reason using Windows XP mode doesn’t work for those cases? It was a VM solution by Microsoft whieh I believe was offered to Windows 7 Pro and higher.

It seems weird to me that Microsoft hasn’t offered something similar for those who need Windows 7. Obviously no one would use it if they had another choice, but it would be an option to get people moved to Windows 10 by having a built-in Windows VM-only license built in.

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Some are still using Fortran, COMTRAN and FLOW-MATIC.

Those are pre that led/founded Cobol. Some still use those but in rare cases.

Is there a reason using Windows XP mode doesn’t work for those cases? It was a VM solution by Microsoft whieh I believe was offered to Windows 7 Pro and higher.

Yes. It does not work well. Some instructions that need to be passed from 8″ floppy disks to the machinery equipment does not work well in VM. MS does offer Windows 7 in VM in Windows 10 but you need to be a per-approved government agency to have it be offered. I have several clients that tried that but that did not work for their needs. They will be staying with Windows 7.

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Since it is software and not hardware, you may want to look into using a VM running Windows 7. If your software doesn’t need to go online, you can pretty much run it safely indefinitely in a VM.

That way you can get the benefits of updating to a supported OS (whether Windows 10 or some flavor of Linux) while still keeping the backwards compatibility.

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rc primak

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Windows-7 will remain very viable–despite MS’s attempts to get users to move to WIndows-10.  Why should users move from a reliable OS to one much less reliable?  Why should users move from an easy to use OS to an OS that is much more complicate and opaque?  Clearly, there are many good reasons.  As for Windows-10’s much touted “enhanced security,” Bu**sh**.  It has proven to be just as penetrable as that of Windows-7.  Apparently MS’s philosophy is to pander to gamers and mobility concurrently with deliberately alienating business and serious consumer users.  One size does not and never will fit all.

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Charlie

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If the numbers of people still using Windows 7 after January of next year are large enough, and for as long as they stay so, that should give developers an incentive to keep updating the versions of their applications for Windows 7. In my case, the main ones I would like to see kept up to date are the browsers and probably some drivers. The rest of those I have, if they work fine now, probably will continue to work fine for quite a while yet.

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 AV

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Charlie, Cybertooth, clasof56

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CT here… UPDATE…

I am the fellow who looks after about 130 Win7 client systems. My clients do NOT include any enterprises. Primary usage is pretty ordinary email and web browsing. Gmail mostly and Windows Live Mail

. My client computers have not had a single Microsoft update since May 2017. That is 3120 computer months of operation.
. There has not been a single instance of infection or hacking of any kind.
. My support work has fallen off by at least 75%.
. These systems run more reliably than ever.
. We use Chrome and have uninstalled Adobe Flash, Adobe Reader and Java
. All systems have Bitdefender Antivirus Plus and no other security software

I have replaced hard drives and/or re-installed windows 7 on most of these systems to ensure they will be working well for as long as my clients want to use them. All systems have a system image of the system before data or dynamic applications.

Bottom line: I expect these systems to be good for another 5 years.

CT

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Steve, Myst, HH33, Elly, Charlie, clasof56

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Microsoft is going to have to EARN my trust

Joe Wilcox : Microsoft’s core platform isn’t software, it’s trust

…Microsoft embraces something broader—design ethics that harken back to the company’s founding objectives and others that share similar purpose as the robotic laws. On the latter point, Nadella repeatedly spoke about “trust” and “collective responsibility”. These are fundamental principles of design, particularly as Artificial Intelligence usage expands and more corporate developers depend on cloud computing platforms like Azure.

“To us, really thinking about the trust in everything that we build, in the technology we build, is so core—and as engineers, we need to truly incorporate this in the core design process, in the tooling around how we build things”, Nadella said today…

https://betanews.com/2019/05/06/microsofts-core-platform-isnt-software-its-trust/

I don’t believe a word coming from Microsoft.

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Steve, Cybertooth, Elly, Canadian Tech

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I have ditched Windows on all Internet attached systems (they are various flavors of Linux). The only W7 install is airgapped and has not been undated in several years now. It is being kept around for some applications the wife aka boss wants to occasionally use.

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rc primak

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You deadpan assertion,  “I can’t imagine why MS wouldn’t want Windows users learning how to stay with a perfectly good W7 operating system…” fairly drips with sarcasm, which I applaud.

For those not reading between the lines, the answer is–as is the answer is for all rampant capitalism–GREED.  Microsoft once put both innovation and customer satisfaction at the top of their priority list, and it made Bill Gates (and some lesser colleagues) quite wealthy in the bargain.  Windows is still the dominant operating system in the world, insofar as I know.  It’s a shame that executive management now sees reliability, consistency, and (most of all) quality of updates as unnecessary, and irrelevant to corporate success.  The deterioration in quality as palpable, and most of us would flock to an alternative if it adhered to the standards that originally made Microsoft Great.

I’m old enough to remember when software updates were necessary…and reliable.  I fear those days will not likely return.

–Carol Anne

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