Win7 End Times…

Windows 10 or bust??

  • What's the big deal? Windows 10 all the way baby!

    Votes: 16 61.5%
  • They'll pry Windows 7 from my cold dead hands..

    Votes: 5 19.2%
  • A little of both: I'll boot as necessary

    Votes: 3 11.5%
  • I think you're overthinking this. Who cares

    Votes: 2 7.7%

  • Total voters
    26
Update: Still on win7, and using the internet as usual every day, and my computer hasn't blown up yet - no viruses, no trojans, no nothing. Of course, I always keep firewall, anti-virus and other system protection up to date. Win 7, even on the scary internet, working great as usual. ;)
 
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Because it makes no sense.
Hardware manufacturers stopped caring and no new drivers are being made for win7. Eventually you'll have to buy a new rig and then what. Petition to make all drivers opensource?

At that point just switch to Linux.
 
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I don't remember the details; i just glance at these article since one of my parents refuse to give up windows 7; i migrated the other parent to linux 6 or 7 years ago - i will say (and this should be obvious to anyone) that if the computer is connected to the firewall there will be port scans (mostly from korea and china) of your computer. A good firewall does help (of course with the large number of exploits in routers ....). I should switch my router to tomato but been too lazy to deal with it. While tomato has its own security flaws at least they are rapidly patched.

Which remote exploits are these? I wasn't aware of any current open ones.

If people persist with using windows 7 I would recommend updating it to as of Jan 2020 and disabling any unneeded services and features (to reduce the attack surface). Then get a decent firewall (a good free one is https://www.pfsense.org/).
 
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I'd be just as worried about Win10 exploits.

Didn't the American NSA just get Rick Rolled with a new win10 exploit a few days ago? There's a new win10 issue every other week. Win7 is probably more secure, though I wouldn't be surprised if the final win7 update made it worse just to sell more win10 copies. Microsoft sucks.
https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2020/01/windows-10-security-flaw-rickrolled-nsa-github/
 
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The win 10 exploit i believe was a day one bug in explorer. While MS has killed explorer for chromium they release a rare patch for explorer. Windows 7 is probably far less secure than windows 10 as many of the services such as explorer in windows 7 are older versions of those found in windows 10 and have not seen a lot of patching. Google famously forbade usage of windows internally (this was before windows 10) because of a 'well known' exploit that ms refused to fix for 7 years.
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The reason (I think) for the push for windows 10 is that MS has decided that cloud is the future of their business and windows 7 does not push cloud services. On the plus side ms is now willing to wave patents and help linux (they recently released a lot of support and barriers to the wine project) because they are not as concern about win 10 being required to use their software. They will lock in future customers is through the cloud services (once companies and users get addicted to storing mail and data in the cloud they will never be able to migrate away). It isn't just about running office from the cloud but mail and documents stored. This means they can afford to be more linux friendly.

I'd be just as worried about Win10 exploits.

Didn't the American NSA just get Rick Rolled with a new win10 exploit a few days ago? There's a new win10 issue every other week. Win7 is probably more secure, though I wouldn't be surprised if the final win7 update made it worse just to sell more win10 copies. Microsoft sucks.
https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2020/01/windows-10-security-flaw-rickrolled-nsa-github/
 
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Update: Still on win7, and using the internet as usual every day, and my computer hasn't blown up yet - no viruses, no trojans, no nothing. Of course, I always keep firewall, anti-virus and other system protection up to date. Win 7, even on the scary internet, working great as usual. ;)

And no one is stopping you or anyone for that matter. When i'm downtown at work, I see pedestrians rushing across the street on a red light too. ;)

Nothing happens to "most" of them.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯
 
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I think one thing is being forgotten here. Hackers are good, relentless and target the most popular software to affect the most people.

I don’t envy MS or any software company. Balancing access and freedom with security has to be a nightmare.
 
Update: Still on win7, and using the internet as usual every day, and my computer hasn't blown up yet - no viruses, no trojans, no nothing. Of course, I always keep firewall, anti-virus and other system protection up to date. Win 7, even on the scary internet, working great as usual. ;)
For typical home use, the security issues are overblown as long as you aren't using Internet Explorer and aren't ever connecting your computer to untrusted networks. Much bigger problem is that hardware support for Win7 started disappearing years ago and software support is going to be rapidly disappearing starting now. If you just don't feel like upgrading yet and are waiting for your next PC upgrade or whatever, that's one thing. But if you're under the illusion that you're going to keep running Win7 indefinitely, you're dreaming and might as well just get the upgrade over with now - because in that case you're just the 2020 version of the people who thought they would run WinXP forever and we know how that worked out...
 
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But if you're under the illusion that you're going to keep running Win7 indefinitely, you're dreaming and might as well just get the upgrade over with now - because in that case you're just the 2020 version of the people who thought they would run WinXP forever and we know how that worked outÂ…

Yeah, I 'member.

Battlefield 3 was the title. DirectX 11.

Thing is, dx12 has been out for ages and there have been games who took the bribe to go dx12 only but they all flopped. For example, Ashes of the Singularity. Eventually they released a dx11 version but it was too late.

There is no must-have dx12 title. Support for dx11 is massive. The current gen of xbox still uses some sort of dx11. The old tricks are not working. The new trick appears to be threatening you with virus' from lack of support and they can take those threats and shove them up their arse. Plus, the support isn't actually ending. You just have to pay for it, now. I'm sure you'll be able to pirate the future updates when they start appearing.

Also, in rare circumstances, like World of Warcraft, you can actually run dx12 in win7. Blizzard said "if you want us to use DX12 then you have to let us run it on win7 because that's 50% of our subscribers."

We are pleased to announce that with today's content update, World of Warcraft will now support DirectX 12 on Windows 7. This allows our Windows 7 users to take advantage of the performance benefit of using DirectX 12, which was previously only available to our Windows 10 users
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/world-of-warcraft-supports-directx-12-on-windows-7/121409

So, it's really not much of an upgrade. It's more like win7 with some extra adware and a cool way to take screenshots that I wish i could do. (win+shift+s)

Plus, with win7 still having 33% of the install base on steam, higher in WoW, and win10 supporting dx11 just fine developers are still not ready to abandon a third of users.

As much as M$ hates it, Win7 is still alive and well and there's nothing they can do about it.

PS. I'm reminded of the time Crysis was pushing fancy effects available with DX10 only but you only had to edit a .ini to enable god rays and stuff in dx9. It's all bullshit. I'm not falling for it again.

And I almost forgot to mention that Vulkan supports everything, even winXP, and is the equivalent of dx12. We can just drop Microsoft at this point and run Vulkan games on free, modern Linux distros with Windows like GUI that are fine for the computer illiterate.
 
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And I almost forgot to mention that Vulkan supports everything, even winXP, and is the equivalent of dx12. We can just drop Microsoft at this point and run Vulkan games on free, modern Linux distros with Windows like GUI that are fine for the computer illiterate.

Vulkan is pretty cool for sure. I use this Nintendo WiiU emulator called Cemu and it recently started supporting Vulkan and the performance is even better than dx12 etc, though that might come down to their implementation.
 
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I see 21% for Win7 on Steam's charts, not 33%. But yeah, the arguments you're making about DirectX 11 were all made for DirectX 9 at one point. Everyone only wanted to use DX 9, so WinXP would work fine forever, etc. Things will move on eventually, just a matter of when.
 
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Last time I looked it was 33%, but, yeah, I guess MS fear-mongering tactics are working on some people.

Fear of virus', fear of loss of a free upgrade.

Well, I'm not afraid! You can't terrorize me, Microsoft!

 
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