Upgrade to Windows 10
 

It is said that by January 2020, Windows 7 will completely lose support for security,i think it is true,i am wodering if there is a any good way to upgrade to Windows 10?

Not sure if it still works:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/heres-...ws-10-upgrade/

Given all the major AV vendors are still providing updates for XP and Microsoft has released the only critical security fix for XP, I'm not concerned about Windows 7 at this time and plan to continue running it for a number of more years. You might want to think about that especially if your machine is more than a couple of years old and has less that 8gb of memory.

XP hasn't been supported in 5 years (aside from specialized instances like ATMs that are difficult to replace and for which Microsoft does still provide fee/contract based support). Nobody should be using XP for anything now.

You can upgrade to Windows 10 by paying for it and downloading an installer, or by installing it and then paying to activate it. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/wi...%3aoverviewtab

But I agree that if you have an older computer and Win7 is working, keep that. I would probably just get a new computer that comes with Win10 if you have an older computer running 7 anyway.

"the only" meaning they have released exactly two crucial XP security patches in the 5 years that XP has been out of support? That means 58 of the 60 monthly patches have had nothing for XP. Does anyone believe that XP has no security issues? No - it means XP is no longer supported outside extreme issues that are found.

Advice to continue running an out-of-support OS and taking your chances with 95% of the security bugs that are present, when a current, in-support OS costs <$200 (or free) is bad advice, IMHO.

And yes, a new machine may be a better option anyway- Win10 included-if financially feasible. Win8 is nearly 7 years old, so most machines with Win7 initially installed are a bit dated (though certainly functional for many use cases).

Curious - what are the major AV vendors providing updates for XP? I use Adobe LIghtroom extensively and they dropped XP support in LR 4, 2013 and haven't offered LR3 for sale in at least 5 years. Photoshop CS6 was the last with XP support, also 2013. They've already announced that the next version won't support Win8 or early Win10 releases.

7 is the new XP. It'll live on.

Supposedly, one can never be a Luddite about Windows 10 - it's essentially Windows 11 or Windows 12 now, but because it has subsumed updates into the brand, it'll always be Windows 10.

Windows 10 is far less user-friendly and user-configurable, especially around updates. It assumes the user is in need of a nanny, and there is no way to turn off the nanny features.

Cf. https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/omni...ot-clinic.html

Iirc you could get Windows XP support for years following regular EOL by telling MS that your computer was a kiosk.

Don't know if that's true for Windows 7.

I can confirm that this does indeed work. You can upgrade Win7 to Win10, and it will remain licensed and activated.

I have a few Win7 VMs that I wanted to upgrade, but didn't want to pay the upgrade costs. So, this thread has made my week :D

Edit - Oh, and after the upgrade and running Disk Cleaner, my VM went from around 63GB to 50GB.... So, saved some space!

Thanks!

I don't particularly like Windows 10 (I'm a Mac boy generally), but a lot of the "user-friendly" complaints are from stuck-in-their-ways Windows XP users (I'm one of them!).

I found that using the search bar for everything eventually becomes second nature. You want the Windows Update dialogue? Instead of making multiple clicks from the start menu, just type Update in the search bar and off you go. Same with device manager and everything else I use a lot.

Getting to Settings or the old control panels aren't exactly hard, even if you don't use search. Ditto for device manager. Most of the really annoying changes happened with the release of 8, and most of the changes from 8 -> 8.1 -> 10 were walk backs of the those annoyances, so I've had quite a while to get used to them.

Yes. It's a rip off of the fantastic MacOS Spotlight feature. And it works perfectly. I found lots of criticism about the bloated and cartoony setup of Windows 8 and 10 and onwards, but after an hour of configuration it's as lean and light as 7 or XP can be.

There is absolutely no question in my mind that the current consumer version of Windows is the best currently out there -- which wasnt always the case before! (And yes I also maintain MacOS is still a bit superior)

No worries; some of these same people in 1995 were saying "I'll NEVER give up DOS!" :D :D :D

I still support a few companies who run DOS-based systems. There simply isn't a replacement system out there for them without completely scrapping all of their equipment, so we keep the old stuff going, which actually is very simple. With VMs, this is even easier. If it's not broke, don't break it! I have no plans to abandon Win7 in my office anytime soon. Only as hardware is replaced, and we hold onto our equipment for a long time.

As many people have discovered, newer isn't always better. Win10's forced upgrades along with Office 365's auto-updates break things with each update. Don't take my word for it -- Microsoft publishes a Known Issues bulletin which talks about this. Invariably, each Windows 10 update breaks our printer drivers and breaks the network links to our accounting system. All brand-name hardware & software being used here. I've even had Windows 10 IGNORE policies and settings which specifically were supposed to prevent it from updating. The settings were there and correct, Windows Update just decided to ignore it. I lost a weeks' worth of data because a batch job got interrupted TWICE by Windows 10 forced reboots. Win10's interface is schizophrenic at best. They have the newer-style menus and windows for some things, but after that you're stuck with the Win 3.11-era dialog boxes and Wizards. Users complain to Microsoft and Microsoft doubles-down by releasing a new update that breaks even more things. The useless and unnecessarily obtuse Powershell is now replacing CMD. What a complete joke of an OS.

We've run a Linux/BSD back-end in our office since ~2008. No licensing fees, no CALs, no Patch Tuesday crap, no rebooting the machines to update things either. Uptime is generally 99.99% annually, running on 15-20 year old servers. Even the PBX is *nix based, running on 15-20 year old hardware. It...just...works. Because of all the issues we've had with Windows 10, we've started to deploy Linux user workstations where we can. It's an adjustment for users, but so is Windows 10. Unfortunately some of the software we use still isn't cross-platform yet and we've not found suitable alternatives yet...but when that time comes, I'll be very happy to kick Win10 to the curb.

Do I place a lot of faith in Linux? I trust my life to it, literally -- my car's control systems (steering, braking, engine) run on Debian Linux, straight from the manufacturer. I don't imagine there's anyone out there willing to do the same with Win10 or Server 2019.

/typing this on a 2009 Macbook Pro running OS X 10.11.6. Replacing w/a Lenovo Thinkpad w/Linux later this year.