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Mainstream Support For Windows 7 Is Over, OS Enters Extended Support

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And f**k MS for not at least make SP2 for Windows 7 before the mainstream support has ended. Leaving a clean installation of Windows 7 SP1 require at least 600mb (Ultimate need 1GB!!) of Windows updates to download and install. And remember there will be even more updates coming for the next 5 years. Is M$ really sink that low to "annoy" your customers out of Windows 7?
 
2017 that still leaves 3 more years for linux to get up to snuff to take over Win7 capabilities
no games will be written for windows 10, there won't be any driver support until after a year, but only on all brand new pc parts made after then...nothing legacy from other windows OS's will work...that's the microsoft tradition. i'm just now getting working device drivers for windows 7 on hardware i bought and used for XP. literally saitek X-45 just released win7 drivers that work in december of 2014 btw thank you madcatz<3 saitek=crap (what, it's french, you shouldn't expect anything more than that)

oh well i already bought the thrustmaster HOTAS set up a few years ago when i made the XP switch. lack of compatible software and drivers was the #1 reason to stay with legacy products and OS's.
in yer eye micropeni......soft
 
actually, windows 10 looks promising. I think in the end, most people will upgrade to that. I'm especially looking forward to see if they truly pull off the "carry your desktop with you" deal. accessing my desktop from my phone opens up some possibilities, like playing steam games, using chrome with all my bookmarks and saved passwords, and using foobar2000 to play my music, all on my phone over wifi.
 


 
at least Microsoft scratched some thing off my top 10 list,eg iso mounting, rar zip support, of course plug and play. but thats all about it. burning a cd is ok in windows but kinda weird. I want to see a better login look, better user accounts feel, better and more fun cloud , and windows user accounts in cloud. more customization like included a large numbers of themes, sound schemes included with buying windows. a way to create and customize a start up screen when windows boots. are some of my faves!
 

LIAR! Windows 8 couldn't use many drivers for different sound and network adapters as well as printers(for which we had to use PATCHED by 3-rd party drivers). Not only that but at the start of the fail show(W8 appearance) many programs didn't work. There were numerous problems with license of Maya and the actual hangups and not booting of Maya even though even on W7 there were no such troubles. The funny part is that the hardware and OS versions were the same yet they had different troubles, the most funny was during OS install because it couldn't do it fully on 2 machines from the first time but repeating the same stupid procedure we somehow managed to install it.
Largely our company aint using windows machines much(majority is on Linux) but some artists that were using those and wanted to try out the W8 were very "pleased" with this crap. I am not even covering the usability and crappy design(if you can call it like that) here. We get W7 hard drive in place and they were very happy with it. Happy ending.


Not to mention that out of the box drivers rarely have a working network driver(and this happened to every MS OS), means you'll have enjoy vesa drivers with all the "joy" it brings, no audio and most of the printers won't work as well.
Hell, i have a freaking mouse that couldn't work with out of the box W7 when any Linux distro or even MacOS would recognize it right away.
 
Rokit: It sounds like you need less exotic hardware. I have printer, mice, video cards, sound cards, you name it that all work 100% on Windows 8. Even older gear, like my Sound Blaster Audigy 2 had Windows drivers (they had to download, but Windows did it automatically)... Exotic hardware is always a PITA.

Wishmaster.... do you ever shut up? You sound like a whiny 12 year old. 2/3 of what you said is BS on a good day.

Christpher1: Try the HD Home Run Prime. It works beautifully in WMC (Haven't tried Plex and such), Xbox 360's and the PS3. Truly a nice solution.
 
2 Cents on this for the Demand list, even if I have to Bring it up to Microsoft, the need for the Classic and XP skin Style to be Included in NON-Touch Screen system, Microsoft STILL has yet to mention or Reveal it, and instead going to the "Metro" Design by Default, you know this is why Microsoft still has trouble with Windows 8, they never included both styles in that OS as the Old CEO Steve Balmer wanted to Eliminate the Classic and XP Skin Styles unless it was Requested when Windows 8.1 SP1 was released, so the Classic Low Res Style should be included, which also would help on systems with Lower System Requirements.
 
My first encounter with Windows 8 was very frustrating. I helped a friend whose Windows 8 Laptop couldn't boot. It was the ultrabook kind - meaning no access to drives without voiding warranty. We tried repairing it with the recovery USB he had made at the time he bought the thing but that ended in an cryptic error message like "repair failed". From this point on it was a nightmare - the laptop would not boot from any other USB stick (later I discovered it was the brilliant "secure boot" feature's fault) and it would not allow me to enter BIOS(UEFI to be more exact) either. No matter what option I selected from the laptop's initial menu It would still boot the damaged Windows that you could do nothing with.
After hours and hours I managed to do a clean Windows 8.1 install (through a very ugly hack I found on the wonderful Internet) and discovered the problem was the laptop's SSD that has shrunk from 32gb to just 4 and probably prevented a windows restore on it. After that I could access the UEFI, and the first thing I did was disable the blody secure boot but now Windows gives me an annoying watermark warning on the desktop about it that I could not remove.
I know my problems weren't entirely Windows 8's fault (the laptop had a hardware problem) but still I felt like it was opposing me every step of the way. Faster and secure boot seems OK in theory but I don't think I like my OS taking control of my hardware and locking me out no matter how fast and secure that makes it.
Since then, I installed windows 8 in a virtual machine to play around with it but I cannot find anything that appeals to me except the fact that Powershell is easier to find (maybe). There are a lot of things I don't like though like the fact it constantly tries to link me with on-line services probably to make me buy stuff and that instead of shortcuts I get those huge tiles so I have to scroll screens to find the app I need. I did not use for very long so I know you can probably get used to it or set it up eventually the way you like but I don't see why anyone would go through the trouble of doing it unless they have to for some reason(eg. they have it on a new laptop).
I understand why Microsoft has to have a different OS every few years but I would like it more if they did more work on the functionality and less on the bling (GUI stuff). A windows 7 with improved file handling (maybe a new filesystem) better handling of multicore cpu's and better drivers appeals to me more than the same OS with different graphics. Windows 7 still looks at least decent IMHO and I loved it since the time I left XP.
So Secure Boot is stupid, at least on ultrabooks!!!
Sorry for rant.
 
 
Haha, a lot of large corporations are still in the process of migrating from Windows XP to Windows 7. I'm typing this from on a Windows XP machine.
 
"Windows 10, which as we saw in October includes a whole set of new features that seems to combine the best parts of Windows 7 and Windows 8"

... and Linux. :)
 
Profit margin.......................... That is the only true reason why Microsoft ever discontinues support for software. Their “Profit Margins vs. Actual Profits” Are not jiving with Wall Street and the Board-of-Directors. I could write an article-sized-response to this but I'm not going to, it would be 10 pages long. Instead its only going to be a page and a half.
I’ve been in the IT field for over 18 years and have over 200 businesses that our I.T. company services. Microsoft has had its lows and highs. And I'm sorry to say that from an I.T. / Business /residential /user stand point, windows 8 and half of windows 10 are going to be low points in Microsoft's track record ( along with vista ). Simply due to the laws of ("business and user physics" yes this is a made up term by yours truly) the fact that companies are still on XP should tell you a lot seeing as how windows 7 was a fantastic stride in comparison to XP and Vista and the subsequent first-3-years that followed. Windows 7 for the most part shined when it was first released compared to XP and Vista. Massive driver support out of the box, no installing drivers for all of your legacy hardware ect… It was the culmination of all that was good and removed all that was bad from 95-98-2000-xp-vista. Whether you like it or not windows 8 is a completely different turn of events. It keeps probably 70-80% of windows 7's core structure, but refocuses its perception on the user interface, and that to the "general populous" is where the judgment comes in. We as a society base everything on visual judgments to sell, buy, acquire. And in my world as an I.T. Professional I'm fine with windows 8 and 10. However my clients/customers are not. And in the I.T. world that can mean 2 things either more business because now I’m training everyone on how to use a new OS/installing programs/software/hardware or I just lost a client because they can’t understand how I just charged them $2000.00 in labor to retrain their entire staff on a new OS. But the nitty-gritty truth for my I.T. company is that it has reduced our “profit margins because we are spending more time training and having to neglect other business because there is not enough time in the day to get to everyone’s needs. It has cost us more money due to the amount of time LOST training updating reconfiguring-drivers hardware 3rd party software that is ”compatible-ish” yet takes hours of tweaking and configuring. And when one of my clients is down due to OS or hardware problems, they are not making money. Which means after 10-20 hours of “I.T. Labor” they start having problems paying me. It’s my job to get them up and running as fast as possible. But when 3rd party software is involved I have no control over getting things to run right and in a timely manner. If every 3rd party company had a Microsoft budget to throw towards R&D every time a new OS comes out, it wouldn’t matter what Microsoft did with their OS’s. But that’s not the case. And so in turn you have “incompatibility-Driver/Hardware/Support-Gaps”, and “User-Incompatibility-Gaps.”
Now I have had to deal with this same conundrum with windows 98 all the way to 7. And I can personally say that windows 8 has consumed 4 times the amount of labor and down time that past operating systems have. And it’s not completely attributed to hardware/drivers support. 70% has been user/operator-error/frustration/incompetency. But I hate to break it to Microsoft that is where a majority of their profits come from. The Ability of a company to purchase and adopt your software/hardware to their specified needs/applications depends on the staff’s ability to use the software/hardware. When you alienate the customer/user/business-owner from being able operating on a day-to-day basis, you have now just put all the blame/stress on the I.T. Department their ability to “Fix” the “situation”. Fact that business are still running windows XP is 100 % proof that upgrading to a new OS is the last thing any company/business wants to do. Why? Because they have to spend $$$$$$ + TIME and lots of it to rebuild their I.T. infrastructure from the ground up. All this being said what does it have to do with Microsoft popping OS’s out faster and faster? …..Profit margin. Corporations like MS get in trouble when their profit margins don’t jive with their actual profits. And their board of directors aren’t exactly “happy when there’re company isn’t rolling in the $$$$$$$. And the best way to boost profit margins is to get everyone to “Buy New” Striking contracts with Lenovo, Toshiba, Hp, Dell, ect. To sell “Exclusive Windows 8 Hardware only” The sooner MS can stop support for one OS the sooner they can start collecting new revenue on a new one. The only grace we get in the I.T. world is when Microsoft decides NOT to alienate its customer basis in favor of a better product, i.e.…. windows XP and window 7. Longevity of support means they have to fix issues on their current platform. And they did this for windows XP, and most of 7 up until the release of 8, which we have not seen the likes of a service pack since 2011. My 2-Cents
 
I think I'm of the same mindset as a lot of win7 users. If it's not broke, no need to fix it. Win7 was incredibly good compared to other flavors of windows. Responsive, decent interface, capable, less hassle with drivers. Not everything works as intended (like backward compatibility to run a program in legacy xp mode - which only works sort of, sometimes). They need to figure out the touch screen crud and market it as such. Leave desktops alone since most people don't use touch on a desktop. Nothing more stupid than putting fingerprints all over the screen you're trying to read, do they have a side business trying to sell more windex or what? It's pretty obvious win 8 is a turd much like vista was and the sooner we can get over it the better.

I'm sticking with win7 as long as I can because it does what I need it to do. What I hope doesn't become the norm is building windows as if everyone who uses it is a moron. They have the same features/access points strewn all over the place. I don't need a slide out button and a taskbar button and a desktop tile and a place inside the start menu to get to device manager. It's awkward at best and bloated.

Maybe they can release two flavors of windows, win for dummies and windows for people who know what they're doing. Tired of being sandboxed with idiot controls and lack of power features I have to dig for because granny keeps misplacing her virtual recipe box or some power puff girl can't figure out the fastest way to get her selfie pasted everywhere. Nothing wrong with casual non techy users, but give them an easy mode or something that looks like win 8 and give the rest of us something useful.

Hopefully networking doesn't get any further dumbed down from win7. It's bad enough. Oh well you have to have a home network to enable ics. What if you need to enable ics on a network other than homegroup? In over simplifying everything they lost fine control of things some people still need or want. Tired of 'easy one click' features that don't get the job done.
 


😉 agreed
 
Maybe they can release two flavors of windows, win for dummies and windows for people who know what they're doing. Tired of being sandboxed with idiot controls and lack of power features I have to dig for because granny keeps misplacing her virtual recipe box or some power puff girl can't figure out the fastest way to get her selfie pasted everywhere. Nothing wrong with casual non techy users, but give them an easy mode or something that looks like win 8 and give the rest of us something useful.
Click to expand...
I agree, there should be two versions and you should have the possibility of choosing yours during the installation - babysitter Windows and Windows for grown-ups.
I don't think Windows 8 is entirely bad (under the hood for all we know it's just a lightly modified Windows 7) but the interface is annoying.
And I dislike very much that, if you have an internet connection during installation it has to have you e-mail account and password. Do they not spy us enough while we are browsing the net, now they have to spy us from the moment we turn on the computer?
 
I've never been able to relate to people who stay on an older version of Windows for an extended period of time. Personally, I've always been able to adapt to a new operating system in a matter of a day or so, taking advantage of all the new features that I want, and ignoring or working around the ones I don't.

With Windows 8, I used the keyboard shortcuts just like the start menu. After an hour, it didn't make a big difference. Later, I decided I liked having a start menu better, so I just installed Start8. I didn't like certain shortcuts in 8.1, so I removed them in the registry.

"But I shouldn't HAVE to use a third party program to make the interface the way I like!" or "I shouldn't have to do that! It should already be done!"

People who get upset at (I assume this is why people get upset) the principle of the matter, are ridiculous. Since when have us power users been such a stupid people that we aren't capable of dealing with change? The operating system doesn't have to be 100% perfect. We're capable of doing what we need to do to get comfortable with it. At least most of us. The important part is what is under the hood.

And for those STILL complaining - Windows 10 adds a bunch of power user features, while retuning to user interface that will be comfortable with Windows 7 users. And that includes all the good things Windows 8 did that were lost under the piles of negative opinions about the interface.
 
The HUGE advancement in Windows 10 is, get this, you'll be blown away... they added a start bar.... Amazeballs, I know. It's like wow, I could've been using Windows 95 this whole time ( w/ pnp)?! I dont know about the rest of you, but I make my living on Windows but don't use their products for anything personally. I am all linux (debian) all the way and my clients all run on Linux (debian w/ Virt-Manager / KVM) as opposed to the now overly bloated VMWare or XEN. However, Windows Azure (you know, that thing that was the laughing stock of the industry 5 years ago) is really on par to change everything. no more need for more than a DC on site. All your app servers, desktop machines ,etc can all be hosted inside and out(internet)...
 
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