Windows 7 “not dead yet”

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Nearly a year after Win7’s EOL, Ed Bott has been diving into how many might still be using the OS. He hints it’s a big number. …as December 2020 dra
[See the full post at: Windows 7 “not dead yet”]

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[Bob99]

Well, I’m responsible for two of those 100 million PCs that were recycled.

I took my two Windows 7 machines this past summer to a mom and pop shop whose owners I’ve known for over a decade and had them recycled into two new Windows 10 machines. The only things that were salvaged from the original machine in both instances was the case and the DVD drive in it. Fans in the cases were even replaced, not just cleaned off.

I kept the hard drive that was in one and the SSD that was in the other. These machines were originally made in mid 2010 (the one with the HDD) and mid 2012 (the one with the SSD). I plan to use Eraser on both before turning the drives in to an electronics recycling place. Why Eraser specifically? Because it lets you pick from different algorithms for deleting files/folders or an entire drive’s contents, as well as letting you select the number of passes performed by that algorithm!

• This reply was modified 4 years, 3 months ago by Bob99.

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Not dead yet, and actually making a slight comeback in November: (!)

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/windows/desktop/worldwide

It’s probably not an “October Revolution”, but stranger things have happened.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, after seeing all the howling, agonized shrieks of wounded Win 10 users on this and so many other forums, I’m just going to putter along as best I can for as long as I can.

Now, I may decide to go with 0Patch after January ($140+ for another ESU year is a bit rich for my blood, vs. about $35 US for 0Patch), but this is contingent on what kind of service I get from a trouble ticket I’m working right now with MS on this machine. Up till now, it’s been bumpy…but as the Turkish colonel (Orson Welles) said in the film,

“Maybe yes, maybe no. We shall see.” :/

But I _am_ avoiding Win 10 like it was a polecat.

Win7 Pro SP1 64-bit, Dell Latitude E6330 ("The Tank"), Intel CORE i5 "Ivy Bridge", 12GB RAM, Group "0Patch", Multiple Air-Gapped backup drives in different locations. Linux Mint Newbie
--
"The more kinks you put in the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the pipes." -Scotty

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MrToad28, SueW, T, Charlie, LHiggins, Microfix, wdburt1, Cybertooth, Tom in Az

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Nibbled To Death By Ducks wrote:

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, after seeing all the howling, agonized shrieks of wounded Win 10 users on this and so many other forums, I’m just going to putter along as best I can for as long as I can.

Now, I may decide to go with 0Patch after January ($140+ for another ESU year is a bit rich for my blood, vs. about $35 US for 0Patch)….

I’ve kept my Win 7 laptop going as well. I basically use it for just email and some internet – no sensitive sites or uses. I have had 0Patch since January 2020 and so far, it seems to be working well, and I am planning to renew my subscription. Patches come in seamlessly and are very unobtrusive, and (fingers crossed) so far they do seem to work.

I also have Malwarebytes anti-exploit, and ESET antivirus running, plus keeping my browser up to date, so hopefully that combination, along with 0Patch, will continue to work.

I know that 0Patch did offer a free trial month to anyone thinking of switching – and I think that is still an option if anyone wants to give it a try.

Happy New Year!

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T, Charlie, Cybertooth

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Stopped in to wish a client a Merry Christmas.  She asked me if we could get their Windows 7 computers back.  I don’t think she was kidding.  The office has been fed up with the constant hassles that plague Win 10 users, most of whom had this monstrosity of an operating system forced upon them, and keep wishing they could return to their reliable Win 7 computers.

Later today I’ll be fixing yet another Win 10 computer stuck in its worthless “try to fix the computer so it can boot” sequence.  I have no idea why UEFI and Windows Boot Manager seem to be a recipe for disaster, but that makes up a pretty big part of my Win 10 support nightmare.

I’ve been doing this since the mid 80’s and after living through the likes of such gems as “Sircam”, which caught us all off guard, I can honestly say the most dangerous malware in the world is easily Windows Update and Windows 10.  I suspect more computers have been crippled by these two “innovations” than anything else floating around.

The computers I use for real work are still running Windows 7 SP1 with updating set to Never.  Not a spec of trouble.  I also have a half dozen Win 10 Pro systems.  Each time I start thinking maybe it’s time to upgrade my Win 7 systems, one of my Win 10 systems starts misbehaving.

Oh well!  I guess I shouldn’t complain.  Win 10 has sure been a goldmine for support companies.

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Only when hardware die, then Windows 7 die too and this will take long time. New hardware not support Win 7 so there is no other way then use Win 10. Linux is no alternative for gaming and power use.

Windows 10 is so bad in many aspects so that is why people stay on Win 7. Me too of course.

 

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Nibbled To Death By Ducks wrote:

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, after seeing all the howling, agonized shrieks of wounded Win 10 users on this and so many other forums, I’m just going to putter along as best I can for as long as I can.

Same. I endorse this completely. Why is it that we’re all not clamouring to get on the Win10 bus until we’re forced to? No, it’s not a long term strategy but then neither is staying on a relatively stable version of 10 until they drop support for it. Win10 is… 5 years old now? One of the latest updates for it was eating hard drives when running chkdsk, a tool that’s supposed to help the user recover from problems not start them. It’s completely unacceptable that we’re this far into release and have to deal with a product that’s eternally in beta.

Please don’t anyone castigate users for clinging to the lifeboat of 7 for as long as possible.

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If memory serves, 8 – 9 % is also the share market of the Macs. So, if those percentages for Win 7 are correct enough, I would say: Way to go, Win 7!

And I would truly mean it.

(This comment has been sent from my Mac.)

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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Nibbled To Death By Ducks

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According to one source, Windows accounted for <78% total marketshare, while MacOS, 17%, as at July 2020.

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Kirsty, I tried to read what is in that article you gave the URL link to, but  it looks like one can only find there the percentage of the Mac’s market share by first becoming a paying subscriber of that Website. Or at least that percentage was not included in the information I could read there, such as the percentage of people that used Catalina in August, out of the total number of Mac users (52.96% worldwide).

By the way: It would be quite satisfying to me if the macOS market share percentage were really 17%, in my totally biased opinion.

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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OscarCP wrote:

it looks like one can only find there the percentage of the Mac’s market share by first becoming a paying subscriber of that Website.

I didn’t get any such warning…

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I saw that too, but there is nothing with the “17%” statement.

And the “invitation” to subscribe for $59 kept popping up rather insistently.

Maybe you saw that “17%” in some other Website? Or are using some browser extension I don’t that that lets you see that?

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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The 17% was given in the hover over the graph.
As to seeing that information in a site other than the one cited… heavens no!
❗

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Kirsty: Well, before someone deletes us both for “off topic”, and perhaps of interest to fellow Mac users: I have been looking around and found values of market share ranging from 8% to 12%. One number close to yours, 17.65%, is in Wikipedia, but it is based on the number of times people use a Mac to browse something on the Web. Once more, I find my skepticism of these market-share survey results reaffirmed.

Have a look here, in the section on “Desktop and laptop computers”:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems

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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NetMarketShare are echoing the figures you originally mentioned, based on the site visits. Using the hover on their stats graph, Windows has 87%, macOS 10.75% (rounded), as at October 2020.

GS-Statcounter has completely different figures, but not sure their basis for calcuation:
Windows 77%, OS-X 17%.

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Hello Kirsty.

I followed your Statista link, and read the following statement (click [Read more] button, then look under _Different versions of Microsoft Windows_ heading):
“Windows is also the server computer OS with the largest market share of over 70 percent in 2019”.

This surprising statement then led me to another Statista link and the following statement:
“In 2019, the Windows operating system was used on 72.1 percent of servers worldwide, whilst the Linux operating system accounted for 13.6 percent of servers.”

Really?!? Seriously??? Sorry, but that just doesn’t pass the smell test. It seems far more likely that any competent, fair, honest assessment of real server installations would show that Red Hat alone had a (significantly) higher share of actual server installations than the paltry “13.6 percent of servers” that Statista is assigning to (all) Linux servers!

So maybe not a great place to get accurate unbiased data?

Hope this helps.

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[JohnW]

I am still running one Windows 7 Pro desktop, as my media/entertainment/gaming center in the living room.

No personal data or business is ever done with it, and rarely browse the web, except to occasionally stream a TV show from a network site onto my big screen TV.

Do some light gaming with an Xbox USB controller pad. Have some older games, including MS flight sims that still run fine. Afraid that Win 10 may break some of them. But since I’m only a casual gamer, it’s not an issue for me to play 10 year old games.

Bitdefender Free and Malwarebytes Anti-Exploit are running in the background, Malwarebytes Anti Malware scans on demand, and it gets a full system image weekly.

It faithfully records my favorite local broadcast network TV shows like clockwork using a Hauppauge WinTV-DualHD USB receiver with an over the air antenna. Using another 3rd party PVR software for recording, and KODI for playback.

I could update this rig to Win 10, but probably won’t consider until my software won’t work anymore. I don’t want to rock the boat, as it is running so smooth as it is.

It’s a home built PC running on an Asus board with an Intel Core i5-3570K 3.4GHz CPU with 16GB DDR3 memory. Using NVIDIA GTX 950 for graphics connected to my 40″ TV, and my living room stereo for audio.

On the other hand I really like Win10, and am running that on my main desktop workstation. 🙂

Windows 10 Pro 22H2

• This reply was modified 4 years, 3 months ago by JohnW.

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JohnW wrote: “I could update this rig to Win 10, but probably won’t consider until my software won’t work anymore. I don’t want to rock the boat, as it is running so smooth as it is.”

Absolutely!

Besides, while getting some more years out of the PC, there is also time for exploring other operating systems than Windows 10. Linux can be run on a VM or on dual boot; macOS, on the other hand, I believe cannot (but, perhaps, this is not entirely right), so one would need to rent a Mac (if willing to pay for that) or get one’s hands some other way on a Mac of a recent model and with a recent version of macOS. In my case I knew several people that use Macs and had been following what had been happening with Macs for several years before I decided that I was going to buy one. So I was already familiar enough with it to know what I was going to get. Whether it is a Mac or Linux in dual-boot with the PC, or Linux by itself in a computer, transferring files of the commonly used kinds, other than executables, between computers, from Windows 7 to Linux or Macs (and vice versa) is not a big deal. Executables need to be recompiled, if one has their source codes. Applications with versions that can run in both Windows and Macs and sometimes also in Linux, also exist. For example Firefox, or MS Office for Macs.

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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OscarCP wrote:

Besides, while getting some more years out of the PC, there is also time for exploring other operating systems than Windows 10. Linux can be run on a VM or on dual boot

Good suggestion!

I already have a hard drive installed with Linux mint on standby ready to boot. This was a dedicated Linux box at one point earlier. But I ended up using this PC to replace an aging Win XP box. Unfortunately most of the software used on this machine today is Windows dependent, so this machine is going to have to stay Windows for it’s main OS as long as I can Semper Fi the Win 7 Pro!

FYI, I have been using Linux on and off since Red Hat 9 in 2003. My first bare metal Linux install thanks to the Red Hat Linux for Dummies book I picked up in CompUSA! 🙂

Windows 10 Pro 22H2

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Kirsty wrote:

The 17% was given in the hover over the graph.
As to seeing that information in a site other than the one cited… heavens no!
❗

Here’s what I get when I open that Statista page. The box about adding “this statistic” is what I get when hovering the mouse pointer over the graph:

Keep Running Windows 7 Safely for Years to Come  
Make Windows 10 look and work like Windows 7

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OscarCP

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I’m seeing that now, too. It was much more helpful when I first loaded the page! No restriction at all.

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I have one remaining Windows 7 box that does not go online ever. I wonder how many older computers are not able to go online and still use an EOL version.

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I would imagine in a lot of poorer countries people simply can’t afford a new PC that can run Windows 10 and their own PC can only run Windows 7 so that’s what they use. I am sure there are those who are from the XP era who finally upgraded to Windows 7 and are again unwilling to upgrade. Strange how the Windows users are far more complex than say Mac users who for the longest time embraced new releases. However I have noticed even Mac users are staying a release or two behind for compatibility reasons, such as Apple dropping 32 bit support. It may be that users stick with older operating systems for compatibility more than anything.

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[MrToad28]

Nibbled To Death By Ducks wrote: 

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, after seeing all the howling, agonized shrieks of wounded Win 10 users on this and so many other forums, I’m just going to putter along as best I can for as long as I can.

I’m with you bro! Picked up a refurb Win10 Pro desktop to use with tax software that will not do Win7. It was a huge hassle to get the updating somewhat squared away..and I still might get updated into BSOD oblivion. I have 7 Win7 PC’s..5 of which I use every day. I’m not able to coordinate any of them with the highly anti-social Win 10 on my own home network. My son, an applications engineer who programs robots, couldn’t solve the home network problem either.  Win 10 PC’s are just too hard for people. I’d bet the number of “From my cold dead hand” Win 7 users is way way under counted. I plan to keep my 7’s going until I can’t get a browser or antivirus that will work with them.

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Charlie, Cybertooth

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I’d imagine that the estimate of Windows 7 machines still out there is under-stated at least somewhat due to use of  user-agent switching (spoofing) add-ons.  (For example, to get a website that arbitrarily refuses to respond to Win 7, insisting “not supported”, think that you are using Win 10 instead.)

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https://borncity.com/win/2021/01/05/windows-7-nicht-tot-zu-kriegen-jan-2021/#more-18064

We tried, and ten failed to deliver, back to using seven with a mixture of 0patch and ESU, simplicity wins.

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I hate Windows 10, love Win 8.1 and that is my work horse.

I still use Win 7 machine for misc browsing but avoid anything that requires a password. I still have not moved everything to the Win10 so use it for pictures and such. Whenever I jump back onto 7 or 8.1 after using Win10 I say “ahhhh“.

I inherited a dog of a Mac that is paired with my iPhone – probably will switch over to Apple somewhere down the line after retirement.

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dbvdb4help wrote:

I hate Windows 10, love Win 8.1

There is so little difference between the two, Windows Update excepted, that I can’t see how you would even notice most of the time.

cheers, Paul

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[Cybertooth]

Paul T wrote:

There is so little difference between the two, Windows Update excepted, that I can’t see how you would even notice most of the time.

In this corner, the opaque (non-Aero Glass) window title bars and borders are both a constant annoyance and a frequent reminder that it’s not Windows 7. And the fellow who had been maintaining the only known way for users to re-create Aero Glass appears to have stopped doing it as of Win10 version 1909.  🙁

Not to mention the hideous Settings app that has slowly been taking over Control Panel’s functions, as well as the well-nigh useless simulacrum of a Start menu that MS tacked onto Windows 10 after eliminating it in Windows 8. Well, at least we still have Open Shell as a suitable substitute for the Start menu.

Keep Running Windows 7 Safely for Years to Come  
Make Windows 10 look and work like Windows 7

• This reply was modified 4 years, 3 months ago by Cybertooth.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 3 months ago by Cybertooth.

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8.1 vs 10, not 7.

cheers, Paul

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Oops, you’re right. Trigger-happy fingers…

But, thinking about it, Windows 8 still has the full-featured Control Panel, and Aero Glass for 8 has never stopped working for that OS. So if I were a Windows 8.x user, these differences would still represent daily annoyances.

 

Keep Running Windows 7 Safely for Years to Come  
Make Windows 10 look and work like Windows 7

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