stopping support of Windows 7

[shankle]

Why should I care if they stop support for Windows 7 pro 64-bit in 1-2020.
I have had all updates shut off for over a year. I also use ESET Smart
Security. I really don't want Windows 10 on my computer. I do regular
maintenance and use Sandboxie EVERY time I go on the internet. This
and others should protect me from Microsoft's threats.
Your thoughts would be appreciated.

[Vortex]

Hi shankle,

Windows XP is still usable today so Windows 7 will survive for a long time as I guess. In the future, virtualization applications like Oracle VirtualBox can be useful to keep alive the old operating systems. Me too, I don't like Windows 10 :

https://betanews.com/2018/10/04/windows-10-october-2018-update-deleting-documents-photos-and-other-user-files/

[felipe]

and if for some reason you want to try a newer windows that is not windows 10 crap, you can try windows 8.1. It's very usable, friendly and manageable... :idea:

[Magnum]

Or you could try Linux Ubuntu.

It is very stable and they are not sneaky like Windows. :-)

[shankle]

Thanks guys,
Think from your comments I will stick with Windows 7 pro 64-bit

[hutch--]

I am stuck in a funny world where the current box is a Win10-64 box as I just could not buy another retail version of Win7-64 Ultimate. You can tidy up Win10 if you are patient enough by blocking the spyware and a settings tweaker but to get it under control, you also need to know where all the settings are which are all over the place like a mad women's sewerage. It is a better OS than Win7-64, faster, less eye candy, more facilities etc etc ....

I have Win7-64 on my last box which gets used on a semi regular basis and I have XP SP3 on the previous Core2 Quad but the real advantage is I have TightVNC on all of them so I can use any of them from my main Win10 box. I recently built a NAS box out of my junk and with left over disks, I have a useful 5 tb remote storage that is only ever turned on if I need to back something up and it does not even need a monitor, keyboard or mouse, it just has a power cable and an ethernet cable so it only needs the space of a small can.

RE : Microsoft support, do yourself a favour and turn it off on XP and Win7 and secure them yourself, Microsoft security is lousy at its best.

[felipe]

sounds a nice environment hutch. are you using a good ethernet cable? (for connecting with the nas)

[shankle]

Windows 10 sounds like a nightmare. With all the stops I have on Windows 7 maybe i'll
survive for a few more years.
All I ask for Christmas is for Microsoft to leave me alone 
Thanks for your reply Hutch

[hutch--]

felipe,

Gigabit ethernet hs been built into motherboards for a very long time now so all you need is a few unmanaged switches and some cat5e and you can routinely move data around at the nominal 1 gigabit. I have under my work table a 300 meter box of cat6 ethernet cable and use it for longer runs as I have the tool for attaching the rj45 connectors. I have looked at what is available for 10 gigabit as cat6 will handle that if the cable is not routed near mains cables but it is still too expensive and you may in the future get optical connections between computers.

It would be wasted on old boxes and the bus speed and disk read/write speeds are too slow for real high speed data transfer. Where I need the extra speed is in backing up complete partitions and its here that a 1 gigabit network is not fast enough. Disk to disk on the same machine is far faster than ethernet and for hundreds of gigabytes, its often faster to use a portable disk.

[felipe]

Nice info hutch, thanks  :icon14:. But i have a question related with this:

Disk to disk on the same machine is far faster than ethernet and for hundreds of gigabytes, its often faster to use a portable disk.

You mean as in the same machine like from one partition to another? and the portable disk will be a usb attached external disK?

[hutch--]

Depends how the machine is set up, if you have USB3 the speed is useful enough to be used with a USB3 portable can. I regularly back up data from one drive to another and this is really fast. A USB3 is much the same speed so in many cases its worth doing the big copy from the computer to the USB drive then copying the USB drive data onto the other machine.

You notice the network overhead when doing network transfer, big file move much more data but large collections of small files really slow down the data transfer rate. If the portable disk is fast, you reduce some of the overhead and you still have a fast data transfer rate to the portable disk. I have an old 250 gig SSD in a USB plugin that works like a USB pen drive but generally faster, sad part ws I bought another 1tb SSD as the price has dropped a lot and it was defective so I sent it back and the post made a mess of it and sent it back to me. After the 2 week delay I sent it back again and instead of replacing it, they refunded the money. Shrug !

[Vortex]

It is very stable and they are not sneaky like Windows. :-)

Yes, Linux is very stable. As a server operating system, it's far more advanced than Windows. Linux provides very powerful tools like rsync, rdiff, rdiff-backup and tar.

[Raistlin]

The impact is......taaa daa... 32 bit is officially dead.
Hutch now needs to rename the site and all our hard work
in 32 bit over the years is now obsolete. Think about it for a minute though....
All OS's after '7' are friendly to 32 but emphatically 64. Now
what ? Well nothing, 32 bit native code is still close to fast  (when you wrote it) and potentially still now faster than 63.5 bit. Still, it does toll the proverbial (I am over using this word lately) bell.

[hutch--]

I am much of the view that 64 bit is the future but 32 bit will remain in the present for a very long time. Among other things Microsoft needs it for their own software so it will not go away any time soon. When Microsoft stop supporting an operating system, there is a term that few use, it becomes STABLE at last. I have a box or 2 running XP SP3 and a Win7 64 box and the gain with both of them is they will never be modified by Microsoft again.

My last box was built out of my junk, a NAS box that has XP SP3 installed on it, everything not required turned off and nothing that tries to send anything on the internet and it only uses the standard firewall as it does nothing else that store my backups.

[Vortex]

I agree with Hutch. The 32-bit system will stay alive for a long time. We have yet very good software coded with 32-bit development tools. No reason to waste those efforts at the moment.