Windows 7 support on new PCs

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From the “I didn’t know that” category… AMD says it will provide Windows 7 drivers for its new “Ryzen” processors. Lenovo’s new laptops will run Win
[See the full post at: Windows 7 support on new PCs]

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Canadian Tech, AElMassry, Elly

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How about 8.1?

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In case of Ryzen W7 means also W8.1.

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BrianL

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Good news. Dell needs to sell computers. Its business customers are demanding Win7.

CT

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Elly

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Well noted, “its BUSINESS customers are demanding Win7″, but there is no good reason for home users to stay on Windows 7/8.1 on brand new hardware.
It is not Microsoft losing out, but those home users.

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Lots of good reasons for home users to stay on Win 7. It can be configured not to call home, and it works well and does what I want it to do, and isn’t changing up on me all the time. I need all of those things.

Friends and family who went with Win 10 feel violated at the lack of privacy controls, are constantly interrupted, have to check all their settings and reconfigure with each update, and have all sorts of problems getting it to work the way it should…

Non-techy Win 10 Pro and Linux Mint experimenter

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satrow

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Last year I bought a new Haswell-based Dell computer with Windows 7 pro preloaded, to avoid the Skylake Windows 7 bug.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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Congrats to DELL for NOT drinking the “Win 10” Kool-Aid.

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Elly

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I think there is no good reason to install old operating systems on new hardware.
For those interested in continuing to use Windows for the future, it is the right time now to move to Windows 10.
1511 is very stable and has been for a while, but you should seriously think about installing 1607 by now, although expect few bugs here and there.

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@ ch100

There is a very good reason = it’s called freedom of choice, similar to freedom of religion.

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Not just. Loss of control, spying, lots of useless bloat, learning curve without any justification, buggy updates,

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+7

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Also, the constant phoning home to M$ n many mandatory auto-updates by Win 10 consumes quite a lot of Internet data n clients’ cptr resources. Those with small Data Caps from their ISP n low-end cptrs will get shafted by M$-Win 10.

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And Win 10 users are unpaid perennial Beta-testers for M$, like in a predatory food chain, ie Win 10 Home users being “eaten” by Pro users, who are in turn being “eaten” by Ent users, who are in turn being “eaten alive” by M$.

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when the new OS is the worse since Windows 1.x ,old os’s r needed, since MS Cant get thier s**t together

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There are plenty of reasons, actually – the first being ease of use. For a typical user it does not really matter if the system or hardware is 8 or 0 years old. What matters is which system suits you more.

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Elly

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Well, I will not insist.
If you know better, do what suits you.

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While you might be technically correct ch100, what matters here is what users like best. It is pretty telling. Yes Win10 might be better for lots of people for lots of valid reasons like gaming and VR. However, lots of users won’t see any significant benefit to the new OS but they see problems, they might find it much less friendly to use and maintain and that is a very valid argument to not use the latest OS.

Less friendly, harder to maintain and at risk of more instability due to the philosophical nature of continuous release with bloat, if those are not valid arguments, I don’t know which ones are. You say it is more stable now, but what about the next time they decide to completely change some feature to, let’s say, introduce the new super 3D AR desktop+? You don’t think they could go back and forth in reliability with the kind of upgrades they do? That’s the problem with the continuous release for home users. They can’t even delay significantly the feature upgrades if they don’t use the Pro version, if they even know how to do it. You would advise folks on a budget to spend even more to get Win 10 Pro instead of a cheaper Win 7 Home Edition PC, even if they are not even able to tell the difference between a Pro and Home version?

Do you realize a lot of people don’t replace their PC because it is not good enough for them anymore on a technical level, but just because their old one broke or is too slow because it is full of junk and they don’t know how to reinstall it? I’m not sure that Win 10 will be better for them and please don’t tell me Win 10 is more secure because if you don’t use Edge like most people, there is probably not that much of a difference between Chrome on Windows and Chrome on Win 10, to name one thing and not the least important one. I could also mention that a lot of folks who buy cheap PCs end up with rebranded old hardware that don’t benefit as much from OS advances as the ones who buy the latest PCIe SSD and chip. Not sure that brand new 1366×768 laptop with 5400rpm hard drive will enjoy much improvements.

On a purely subjective level, I think the experience of a desktop user who just browse the web and do a bit of Office work wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between his apps running on Win 7 or Win 10. There is not a significant experience improvement from a performance standpoint.

What is sad is more the fact that those new PCs won’t get support after less than 3 years. Maybe that is enough time to plan using something else. At some point, a lot of users will have to face the difficult decision to move away from Windows or accept the new world order.

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AElMassry, Elly, Bill C.

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Another example that happened to me right after I wrote that yesterday.

A woman come to me and she is very annoyed by her quite new computer running Window 10. There is this thing on it called Onedrive and she has no idea what it does but it continually tells her she doesn’t have enough space. She tried removing files from it, but it deleted files locally at the same time and she lost her files. She also said that whenever she tries to save a file in Word, it goes to Onedrive even if she did not save it there and only locally. She don’t understand at all what is going on and she is desperate because it is all way too confusing for her.

Now that is a real Windows 10 experience from someone who uses computers all day at work with no issue, but is left to herself at home. The purposeful confusion Microsoft creates by bloating and coercing by sneakingly pushing bs features that are just there to rake up money is creating real problems for people.

It reminds me a bit of that Apple trick to give you 5GB Icloud storage, make you quickly answer yes to store all my photos there and then make it incredibly difficult to recover your pictures from there and save space for only the latest ones, so you end up accepting their initially very low fees for more storage, until you bust the limit again and you have to pay more because you don’t understand at all how all this work and you have lost control of your personal files.

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Elly

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Ok, now I am really mad.

Does anybody have a solution for this issue?

Someone called me saying they are a bit annoyed that Windows 10 search results are not shown unless you click on the documents filter on top. So I tried to reproduce the issue and it is true. Whenever I search for a file that exists, or just an extension like .pdf after pressing the Windows key, nothing is shown, unless I click on the “Find results in documents” button on top and then everything is shown. So, is this a bug where the complete search results are not shown in best match? I saw online someone posting about that in March last year and complaining it is very difficult to file a bug at Microsoft.

Please note I use a second partition where the documents reside and I changed the indexing location to include the folders where I have the data. I have done that a ton of times in previous Windows edition with no issue. The file is indexed because it is found when I click on the “Find results in documents” button, but never when I just write its name or part of it after pressing the Windows button.

Now if the only significant productivity improvement since Windows XP don’t work better than that, there you have another reason to not jump to Windows 10.

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Elly

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Whenever I save a document, whether in Windows 10 or Windows 7, I always do “save-as” the first time, to make sure that it saves where I want it to. On subsequent saves, you can choose “save”, because now Windows knows where you want the document to be saved to.

Also, open File Explorer, right-click on the Documents folder, and choose Properties. On the Location tab, there is a window. Put the folder where you want to save documents into this window and click Apply. From now on, the default Windows location for your documents will be whatever you put into that window. That will hopefully keep OneDrive from being the default location.

It sounds like some of her folders are synchronized with OneDrive. Here is some good information about how to remove certain folders from being synchronized with OneDrive, or how to “unlink” OneDrive entirely (doing this should solve her out-of-space problem):

http://www.howtogeek.com/222817/how-to-configure-onedrive-to-sync-only-certain-folders-in-windows-10/

Jim

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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Elly

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Three years is a long time. It seems unlikely at this point, after witnessing how MS has responded to criticism so far, but you never know– Windows 10 might become something that critics like me would want. Hope springs eternal! I’m not betting on it, though.

If 10 is as bad then as it is now, I am seriously looking at moving to Windows 8 with (at least) the third-party tools I listed in the post I made in the Tools section. That will buy me another three years to see if Windows 10 becomes decent (or irrelevant).

There are a lot of people who say that Windows 7 is obsolete and should be cast aside because it’s so old. Why is it obsolete if it does what its users want it to do? Nothing is obsolete if it suits your purposes, and “old” doesn’t mean “bad.” As long as it is still getting security updates, it meets my need better than other versions of Windows.

“Features” is a word that gets thrown around a lot in discussions like this. MS can choose to advertise anything they want, but what constitutes a feature (as opposed to a flaw) is very subjective. Yes, it is true that by sticking with 7, I’m not getting the newest “features” from Microsoft… but not getting the latest “features” is a very appealing feature in itself if the existing product already meets the user’s needs.

Windows 7 has a mature code base that changes very little, and that means stability. Windows 10 receives all the same security fixes as 7, but it is having all kinds of new stuff tacked on all the time. Every change that is made to the code (in any program, not just Windows) has the possibility of causing new bugs, and with Microsoft’s QA people mostly gone, such bugs are bound to make it into the released updates. We’ve certainly seen that ever since Windows 10 was released, and with the changes coming constantly, it will probably remain that way. Why would I trade stability for features I don’t want anyway?

So if I were to build a new PC now, it would not have 10 on it. I’d never pay for something as bad as 10… I wouldn’t even take it for free on my main two PCs, so why would I ever pay good money for it? Deals can be found for 7, and from what I understand, the free upgrade still works, even without the GWX push, so the possibility of upgrading, getting the digital entitlement registered with MS, then rolling back to 7 still exists.

Even if I was considering moving to 10 because of the relatively short time 7 has left, I surely would not make the move now! Why tolerate the next three years of nonsense and trying to fight Microsoft for control of my own property if I don’t have to? I don’t see any reason to believe migration will be any easier now than it will be in three years, so if I was going to make the move, I’d wait until I had to.

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)

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HiFlyer, satrow

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@ ch100, a big AMEN!

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Well, I’ve been using W10 on an ancient (LGA775 based) computer for 2 weeks now because I’m willing to trade off some things that were better in W7 for increased performance I get in W10. But that was a deliberate choice after testing 7, 8.1 and 10 for a week or two in most typical scenarios on my PC – because I could run all 3 of them without any restrictions imposed by either MS or hardware manufacturer. Or both of them cooperating and forcing me to upgrade my system.
And, well, 1607 gave me 3 BSODs in 1.5 weeks – something that hasn’t happened for a few last years I’ve used Windows 7

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Sorry to hear about the instability – I wouldn’t be able to stand that. Unfortunately, with something as complex as an operating system, it seems to be an inevitable characteristic of a “continuous changes” release strategy. There’s never time to stabilize it before it changes. That being said, thankfully on my test system I haven’t had a Win 10 crash in well over a year.

I’m always keen to hear specifics when someone says Win 10 provides increased performance, because I have done a lot of testing and could not find it. But of course everyone’s usage and needs are different.

What did you find to perform better?

And did you test a fresh Windows 7 or 8.1 installation against the fresh Windows 10 installation?

-Noel

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Elly

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There may be a slight illusion of improvement in performance in Windows 10 due to the Core Parking feature of Intel CPUs being disabled by default. I think this does not apply to AMD CPUs.
I posted a reply on one of the Microsoft sites with how to make the setting visible and set the Core Parking to 10% on the Balanced Power Plan, which would make it like Windows 7. The reasoning was to avoid overheating in particular for Notebook computers.
Performance Power Plans have always had Core Parking disabled.
I know that the Windows 2012 Server and later disables Core Parking for Intel CPU, but I don’t know if this is the case for Windows 8/8.1.

@Noel Login VSI which set the standards in performance benchmarks for Enteprise VDI has found results consistent with your findings.
https://www.loginvsi.com/blog/520-the-ultimate-windows-10-tuning-template-for-any-vdi-environment
https://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=10&ved=0ahUKEwigu52y7YLSAhUCFJQKHT8MDzoQFghPMAk&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.projectvrc.com%2Fwhite-papers%2F18-windows-10-in-vdi-first-analysis%2Ffile&usg=AFQjCNHTPaEEMKC-LkfkWYW54PzFhOoEZQ&cad=rja

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Elly

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That is really strange, because I’ve used several preview builds and cannot recall any BSODs – I tend to believe there is something wrong with nVVIDIA drivers as I’ve changed the card recently from 750 Ti to 1050 Ti and I had also one boot to desktop with 800×600 resolution, so I would point graphics card as the root, but that’s just a guess.
As far as performance goes, obviously, it boots A LOT faster than W7, even on SSD (yes, due to hybrid boot, I know, but still, if it works and is faster then why not use it?), but that is of course on par with 8.1.
The other area is games (that’s where it really matters) – surprisingly enough, most of the benchmark show almost similar results or W7 tends to be a tad quicker, but real games like GTA IV feel like completely new (60 FPS to 65 FPS on average, that’s +12% “for free”), GTA V is a bit smoother as well, Rise of the Tomb Raider gets a nice 3-4 FPS boost and on my config is actually quicker in DX12 than in DX11.
I did not test file copying, directory deleting or such, because I don’t care, actually. Also no testing on CAD programs, 3D rendering and so on…
Test were done on fresh installs of W7 Home Premium, W8.1 Enterprise (Evaluation) and W10 latest build as of mid-January. All of them 64-bit.
Config: Q9650 @4.2 GHz, P45-based mainboard, 8GB RAM, nVIDIA 1050 Ti 4GB

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Elly

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Good points about the gaming. This is where Win 10 should shine due to the latest DirectX, when the game actually don’t crash…

However, I wouldn’t think your booting faster is necessarily due to hybrid boot. When I install PCs that have good performance, I always disable Hybrid boot as it makes the PC boot slower. Deleting the hibernation file seems to make it faster to boot and I don’t understand why, but I got those results often. Win 10 might or might not boot faster, depending on a lot of factors. I can tell you I don’t see the difference. I installed a Win 8.1 PC that booted in 8 seconds 3 about 3 years ago with no hybrid boot or anything, just a Samsung 840 Pro SSD.

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Actually, when it comes to GTA IV, it’s a 9 years old game, very poorly ported from consoles. There was a patch to it in Dec 2016 (yes, they officially patched a few years old game) with “performance optimizations”, but I couldn’t observe any on W7, on W8.1 performance was the same, it’s only W10 that gained considerably, so it seems the system is somehow better suited for gaming, at least in some cases (on the other hand, I haven’t observed any situation, where W10 would work considerably worse).
W8.1 and W10 should boot more or less at the same time, W7 is visibly slower (although that is still not a deal-breaker to install W10 in any case, at least for me).

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And, honestly, those BSODs are NOTHING compared to what I went through using Excel 2013 – it would crash itself a few times a day – and that really means lots of work lost.
I can easily say that’s the worst edition of Excel I’ve ever used – and I’ve been using it since 97, I guess.

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32-bit or 64-bit Excel and which Operating System and bits?

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Don’t know about the Excel (I’d guess 32-bit, but that’s just a guess), the system was 100% 8.1 and 99% 64-bit.

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It might be the hardware not supported well to generate BSOD. Or non-compatible application conflicts?
Generally speaking, Windows 10 any major official release (1507, 1511, 1607) does not generate BSOD as a rule, although there may be other annoying bugs.

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I look forward to Ryzen’s release and really hope it provides AMD what they need to get back into the game.

Probably my biggest concern (beyond the chip being a disappointment) is that it’s backed by good sub-components with great driver support. Due to AMD being relegated to budget systems, you often see budget implementations of USB, wireless, and other areas of chipset support (SATA controllers in some cases). Some of these have poor performance, some average, and some quirky behavior either due to hardware or drivers, in a system where the CPU may be unremarkable but works fine. It ends up giving the whole system a bad name, and causes a consumer to say “My last AMD system was awful, I won’t be doing that again”.

It isn’t just the heart that needs to be healthy; it’s the secondary components too. It’s something I communicated in the past to a friend who now works at AMD, and I hope that in his position he was able to pass that one on.

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Elly

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My main machine is an aging AMD 6-core FX-6300. Works great, but I’ll be looking at Ryzen to see if it makes sense to retire this PC and get a new one – particularly because I’m using a lot of VMs these days. Fingers crossed.

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I would go Intel and the highest available clock with Turbo enabled for virtualisation. Between number of cores and frequency for the same price, I would chose the highest frequency available with Turbo, but this is an ongoing discussion between virtualisation professionals and it largely depends on the use case.

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anonymous wrote:

@ amray

The link you provided may be fake news or alternate facts or misrepresentation of facts.

According to http://www.zdnet.com/article/lenovos-windows-10-contenders-new-pro-laptops-even-include-thinkpad-for-vr/ , Lenovo will be supplying the Win 7 drivers for some of their new high-end cptrs that come with Intel Kabylake chips, n not Intel.

It will be the same for AMD Ryzen chips, ie it will be the OEMs like Lenovo, Dell, HP n Acer who will be supplying Win 7 drivers for some of their new high-end cptrs that come with Intel Kabylake n AMD Ryzen chips.

It is normal business practice for the cptr-OEMs to supply all the drivers for their cptrs by liasing with their component device manufacturers, eg Intel, AMD, NVidia, Broadcom, etc.

If that is so, it is good.

It shows clearly that many customers, at least in the business world, do not want Windows 10 at this time. So even if Microsoft said “new” CPUs will only be supported on Windows 10, the computer OEMs are taking things into their own hands by providing Windows 7 drivers for the hardware themselves. They have to do so if they do not want to lose business.

I see the same thing in the motherboard manufacturers. Microsoft said Kaby Lake CPUs are supported only on Windows 10, but motherboard manufacturers like Gigabyte provide Windows 7 drivers for their Kaby Lake motherboads (Z270/H270/B250) so customers can still use Windows 7 on these motherboards if they want.

Microsoft must be unhappy seeing all of these, haha.

Hope for the best. Prepare for the worst.

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@ James Bond 007

Good to hear that Gigabyte are providing Win 7 drivers for their Kabylaked motherboards = provide user choice.

Those who wanna build their own Win 7/8.1 cptrs with Intel Kabylake or AMD Ryzen chips and other latest components will likely encounter problems with absent Win 7 drivers. Hopefully, they can get and install Win 7/8.1 drivers from Lenovo by using the above Lenovo specs for their DIY rigs. Or else, they will hv to make do with not-so-modern cptr components.

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(So unfortunately my last reply was hosed.)

If you want to use Windows 7 or 8.1 on a Kaby Lake motherboard and CPU, the most likely place to encounter problems will be if you want to use the integrated GPU on the Kaby Lake CPU. Intel has not released a driver for it on Windows 7 and 8.1. Gigabyte only provided “beta” drivers. So using the integrated GPU on a Kaby Lake CPU on Windows 7 and 8.1 you are likely to encounter problems.

Gigabyte provides all other relevant drivers for their Kaby Lake motherboards for Windows 7 and 8.1 (64 bit drivers for 8.1 only).

If you don’t mind paying a bit more to build your own systems, you can use a X99 motherboard and a Core i7 5820K / 6800K or higher class CPU. The X99 platform still fully supports Windows 7 and 8.1. Note, however, that the next generation of Intel HEDT (High End Desktop) platform is expected to be launched in the second half of this year, replacing the X99 platform. I would expect this new platform to be supported only under Windows 10.

Hope for the best. Prepare for the worst.

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@ amray

The link you provided may be fake news or alternate facts or misrepresentation of facts.

According to http://www.zdnet.com/article/lenovos-windows-10-contenders-new-pro-laptops-even-include-thinkpad-for-vr/ , Lenovo will be supplying the Win 7 drivers for some of their new high-end cptrs that come with Intel Kabylake chips, n not Intel.
It will be the same for AMD Ryzen chips, ie it will be the OEMs like Lenovo, Dell, HP n Acer who will be supplying Win 7 drivers for some of their new high-end cptrs that come with Intel Kabylake n AMD Ryzen chips.

It is normal business practice for the cptr-OEMs to supply all the drivers for their cptrs by liasing with their component device manufacturers, eg Intel, AMD, NVidia, Broadcom, etc.

1 user thanked author for this post.

Elly

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