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I don’t know what sort of problems you’ve run into, but I’ve been doing my on-line banking, including autopay, statements, deposits, transfers, etc with Win7 for years and have had no problems with any of the brand name banks such as Chase, Citi, etc. I also access investment accounts the same way and no problems, I haven’t caught a virus since I can’t remember (Kaspersky). I don’t know what your specific experience has been or why you make such blanket statements. I used NT years ago when it was the best thing out there but huge improvements have been made and Win7 offers many of the same advantages but it no longer gets trashed if you don’t shut it down correctly. I agree, people can learn new technologies, but I reject the idea of changing just for hte sake of change. Perhaps newer Windows protect you better from various asaaults but so will user awareness and not downloading everything you come across.
Win7Pro, I5 CPU, 8Gb RAM, SSD boot drive, external 4Tb SSD storage
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Well, a big thank you to everyone who has contributed their knowledge and experience in this thread. The general agreement seems to be that those who continue to use Win7 plan on staying that way until forced by gunpoint to change, and I’m in that school, for sure. I personally don’t see any serious advantages from spending hours installing a new, questionably better O/S, learning the ins and outs of what MS calls an upgrade, which usually means they’ve moved stuff around and you have to go hunting for what you used to know exactly where it lived, and so forth. One day my current hardware will die and I’m thinking a nice refurbished Dell or HP with a clean Win10 install like my wife’s ACER is as far as I need to go. Thanks again to everyone here.
Win7Pro, I5 CPU, 8Gb RAM, SSD boot drive, external 4Tb SSD storage
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I’ve used Gmail and I think it’s very amateurish. I have been using Mozilla’s Thunderbird Portable for years and have no complaints. You can just copy the whole thing from one unit to another, no ‘installation’ needed, and it does everything a mail program should. It doesn’t require cellphone verifications, it has good junk filters and rules options, you can make as many folders as you need and make rules to route certain mails to specific folders, you can make templates to use as business or fax cover pages, and what more do you want from an email program? Quadratic equation solving?
Win7Pro, I5 CPU, 8Gb RAM, SSD boot drive, external 4Tb SSD storage
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I’m inclined to go that route when my existing desktop blows up, which it will, one day. They all do, sooner or later!
Win7Pro, I5 CPU, 8Gb RAM, SSD boot drive, external 4Tb SSD storage
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Get the ISO for Win7 as suggested and use it to burn a DVD-RW (you’ll need a DVD, not a CD) and use a USB connected external optical drive to boot from, if the laptop doesn’t have one built in. The laptop should have a key permitting you to choose where to boot from and you can select the optical drive with the Win disc in it and that will boot it up correctly. That’s easier than building a bootable USB thumb drive, especially if you’re not certain the laptop has a working Windows on it.
Win7Pro, I5 CPU, 8Gb RAM, SSD boot drive, external 4Tb SSD storage
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That was one of the first things I tried but that wasn’t the problem. Apparently the BIOS had gotten scrambled, I have no idea how. How would you scramble the BIOS code? It needed either an unscrambling, if that was possible, or perhaps some component on the MB had failed, in which case it was new MB time. Neither option very appealing. Our power here is very steady with no surges. How could that happen? The tech support folks at GIGABYTE (MB manufacturer) were extremely helpful finding the right update for a 64bit system, and how to install it, and that resolved the boot up issues. Now you can access the BIOS via the DEL key on boot, as is normal, and make whatever changes you need, and it will remember that and reboot correctly, and a hardware check verifies it’s on the more recent BIOS version, the best one for my setup according to GIGABYTE. They were very responsive via messages and without them I probably would have screwed something up.
Win7Pro, I5 CPU, 8Gb RAM, SSD boot drive, external 4Tb SSD storage
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A wee update: As I mentioned, staying on Win7Pro seemed like the way to go, but just last week my hardware developed Alzheimer’s or something similar. It looked like the POST was not running right and the unit would sometimes not go to the boot loader on the SSD. It would go into a shutdown/restart loop and the only way to get it to boot right was to clear the CMOS via the jumper and unplug the power. Then it would boot right. It started to look like my BIOS was scrambled or something along that line and, with some help from the motherboard manufacturer GIGABYTE, I got the BIOS upgraded to a more current version. The unit now booted correctly but, most important of all, the Win7Pro was totally undamaged and booted up perfectly. A bit of an improvement over earlier versions of Windows, which could get irretrievably damaged from this sort of screwed up booting.
Win7Pro, I5 CPU, 8Gb RAM, SSD boot drive, external 4Tb SSD storage
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Chrome has announced they will no longer support Win7, but Firefox (which I prefer) continues to work well.
Win7Pro, I5 CPU, 8Gb RAM, SSD boot drive, external 4Tb SSD storage
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I am the original poster who started this topic, and I have to tell you, I am anything but a ‘home user.’ In fact, I was a full time computer consultant for over 20 years in the San Francisco Bay Area, and by the time we left, I was one of the guys who got called to fix messes made by other low-rent consultants, so I think my opinions on O/S’s carry a bit more gravitas than home users…I’ve been at this since DOS 3, through every windows up to Win10, Windows Terminal Server, Novell, Quarterdeck, you name it, I’ve probably tried it as some point, and I wouldn’t abandon my Win7 for any price. It works well, it is bug free, I’ve NEVER gotten a virus from anywhere (using Kaspersky for several years, as well as Avast and several others) and I haven’t paid for any ‘special update’ programs, just the ones MS pushes out for Defender and their other built-in protection schemes. I always advised clients to not upgrade themselves into oblivion and that continues to be my guiding principle. Call me ‘old school’ because that’s what I am. And from the frequent newsletters I see from this site, Win10 and 11 continue to have glitches, bugs, updates that don’t work correctly, bluescreens, etc. Who needs that?
Win7Pro, I5 CPU, 8Gb RAM, SSD boot drive, external 4Tb SSD storage
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Thanks to everyone who took some time to offer their sentiments and experience on this topic. I have decided to ride the horse as long as it’s living, i.e., I’m staying on Win7. It has worked reliably for years, I have revived it several times from crapware that either got past the Kaspersky or I might have unwittingly installed, and it supports the two most important programs I use. The main one is an older version of Quicken, the kind that lives on your computer and gets installed from a disc, not the rental version on-line. My Q has years of financial data and works perfectly and I haven’t found anything to replace it. The second important program is the Thunderbird email program. I see nothing to be gained by moving up to W8-9-11. I still get security updates from MS, and other updates to FFox.
Win7Pro, I5 CPU, 8Gb RAM, SSD boot drive, external 4Tb SSD storage
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