Updating Windows 7 machines to Windows 10

On a sunny day (3 Feb 2016 10:45:24 -0800) it happened Winfield Hill wrote in :

I am not a windows user. But from the viewpoint of 'upgrades' (of my Linux boxes), I ONLY 'upgrade' when I buy new hardware. Then usually I have to spend days getting things to work again due to incompatible libraries, changed APIs, yet an other window manager, totally new systems etc,

I am sure Micro-Sof is the same.

I see software as part of the hardware, especially the OS (it should be an interface to the hardware ONLY) so it should not be 'updated'. Drivers and their availability is a different thing.

So, and from the point of view of 'security', use a good firewall, or if it is your design PCs, do not connect them to the internet at all, or even only to the LAN when copying stuff.

Works for me, I have one old box with win98... dual boot with Linux. All the rest is Linux.

You can get a Win10 + Android double boot computah for 141 $ these days:

for that money versus the hours spent 'upgrading', the choice would be easy. Are those specs good enough? I read positive user experiences about that, have not tried it, When somebody get Linux running on it I may try one, they have Linux running on the X7.

My local computer dealer warned me to avoid Windows 10 unless the manufacturer can certify compatibility. He's been making a lot of money unwinding Win 10 "upgrades". HP support was kind enough to inform me that my machine (3 years old) has not been tested and may have issues with "certain device drivers".

HP has since sent me several discount offers for a new 'Win 10' computer.

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Grizzly H.

Windows 10 will only be more secure because it is built on the code base of every other version of windows (OK they are trying to pull out lot of bugs, but they will have introduced just as many with their new - read untested - 'features')

As for the rest. Older hardware will not be issued new drivers - what you have may or may not work with win 10.

Windows 10 spies on you and sends information to microsoft, who then send it to others. If anyone uses cortina it is even much much worse.

Windows 10 uses more resources - the performance of you PC's *will* drop.

Windows 'Edge' is just as big a disaster as Internet explorer - new cosmetics is all important when the reputation of your product sucks.

Microsoft isn't giving away win 10 out of the goodness of their cold, dead heart. It seeks to dominate a new market and then with the same old 'embrace, extend, extinguish' policies it has always had, introduce new and/or incompatible and/or every changing versions of 'standards' so only microsoft products work 'properly'. Can anyone say Netscape or Kerberos?

Plus, you will be at the cutting edge - which always costs more and takes more effort to stay there (you get to be the bunny who fixes problems for the first time)

Have a look at how well the compatibility modes works in windows 7. Way less than half of software that won't run on 7 can be made run with compatibility modes. Do you have any reason to think Win 10 will be better? And VM emulators generally suck for serious use. Microsoft will blow off any request for help by telling you your software is incompatible and needs to be replaced - that will be there default position.

and for all this you get zero new features you need for your business

My advice, Wait a very long time

I have VS2010 on a WIN7 machine and the upgrade choked.

It would be better to start from scratch. Clean install of WIN7 and upgrade to get the license. Then Wipe the win7->win10 upgrade and do a clean install of WIN10.

But I'm for the new hardware/Win10 combo.

Cheers

My understanding is that Windows 10 is a sneaky attempt to go to subscription-based pricing... that is, an ANNUAL FEE :-( ...Jim Thompson

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| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    | 
| San Tan Valley, AZ 85142     Skype: skypeanalog  |             | 
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  | 
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     | 
              
I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.

Just like an Anti-Virus. No protection if you don't pay!

Cheers

Plus a shitload of spyware.

I upgraded. It bricked my machine and the revert back to Windows 7 option did not work

Took me countless hours to get up and running again

It's really annoying, you know the system downloading the windows 10 upgrade and constantly suggesting to install it

My advice, wait until it's mature

Cheers

Klaus

I understand (but don't know for 100% sure) that the free upgrade to windows 10 is for the llife of windows 10 and no subscription will be needed... That is, IF you upgrade now. (again, not certain about that)

What I DO know is that I can NOT just upgrade to 10 from 7 because I (and others at my company) use an IAR ARM (EWARM) embedded compuler/IDE and what we found was that updating from 7 to 8.0/8.1, our JTAG drivers did not work anymore. This would make us have to pay around $10,000+ to update our IAR sytems to get the newer ones so that we could debiug our projects. I ASSume that windows 10 will have the same problems.

Other than that, I still don't know what else is not compatible with 8 or 10 ? What I tend to do is to have multiple partitions or multiple laptops with different OS's so that I can use what I need. (including a MacBook) I DO have my wife's old windows 8.1 machine (she passed way last June) and it seems to work OK with general software and they are HOUNDING me to updgrade to windows 10 and I keep refusing to the point of renaming the C:/windows/system32/GWX directory and microsoft eventually keeps fixing it again.

I understand and have seen problems with windows 10 but I have also seen applications run faster on 10. Like, maybe even LTspice.

boB

I'm near EOL myself, so I don't plan to EVER "upgrade" to Windows 10 ;-) ...Jim Thompson

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| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    | 
| San Tan Valley, AZ 85142     Skype: skypeanalog  |             | 
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  | 
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     | 
              
I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.

Thanks very much, Klaus, I wanted to hear from someone who actually tried it. My previous upgrades, XP-to-Win7, were builds from scratch.

--
 Thanks, 
    - Win

I just transitioned to new PCs, HP/XP to Dell/Win7. Some old apps didn't work. Everything had to be reinstalled. It took a while. I hope that will last, say, 5 years.

The new ones do run Spice about 4x as fast.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

There is only one safe way to run Windows: in virtualization, firewalled so it can only see a secure Linux or OS/X host (where you do your web browsing and net access). Virtualisation tools are so advanced that you really can't tell you're running virtual; a single keypress flips instantly between environments. They come with tools to virtualize an existing physical machine, so you don't need to rebuild.

You can save "My Documents" outside the Windows environment, which allows you to make savepoints and recover to them without any accumulation of cruft.

I was principal (software) engineer for 17 years in a 140-person Microsoft Gold-partner company producing deep systems software for Windows, but that's how I choose to operate. Microsoft's development practices are massively better than in the past, now up with the best in the world, but their business practices are just as questionable as ever. Rent an operating system? Go take a running jump...

Clifford Heath.

I'm not sure you said what you meant to there, but I understood.

I don't believe that's true. Their development practices are generally at the leading end of world standards now, and in some cases are even leading. Any unfortunate "features" are almost certainly both deliberate and well-tested.

This is unfair wrt Kerberos. The extensions Microsoft added to AP and the ticket structure were desperately needed enhancements that fix major weaknesses in the original design. It's a shame they didn't "go through the front door" but it's likely that would have delayed deployment for a decade or more. They didn't get the implementation perfect (we made quite a bit of money because I invented a solution to one of their larger gaffes) but the idea of including a list of group memberships into tickets is strong, and the use of SIDs (despite being derived from the NT security model) is also quite cross-platform suitable.

Clifford Heath.

Look for the GWX Control Panel -- it's about your best bet for keeping Windows 10 from your Windows 7 or 8 machine. It's a one-stop shop for disabling Win 10 upgrades.

Also turn off automatically downloading updates. That means you need to be more vigilant about system updates, but hopefully reduces the changes of you coming in one morning and finding either a fresh Win 10 installation on your machine, or more likely, a failed partial Win 10 installation.

One of my gripes with 10 is the inability to control the amount of information it reports back to Microsoft.

What virtualization software do you suggest?

Chris

You will lose or will have to re-install some of those legacy apps. You should perform a full backup of any given OS drive fisrt, and consider buying a whole new SSD replacement in cases where performance gain is also a desire. That way, you can use Linux to clone the drive and update that drive and see if the results are desirable, and if not simply put the original drive back in. They are cheap upgrades to any system.

If considering an SSD, I would also consider getting an mSATA drive and conversion caddy, or even an M.2 drive and caddy as opposed to a tired old

2.5" form factor SSD as the mSATA and M.2 drives are astoundingly faster, even with the downgrade of the conversion caddy. The conversion caddy is so that you can plug either drive choice into the interface your current system sports.

Then you should not even have responded.

Damn you are a lot more stupid than I originally assessed you to be.

If it ain't broke...

A small data point. I had an old Asus netbook which used to run Windows

7 tolerably well, but which became far too slow, probably because of updates. Various Linux versions (Linuces?) weren't much better, probably because the drivers weren't very good. So I tried Windows 10. Stupid waste of time, no better. To save myself from wasting any more time (and I knew I would), I threw it away.

Cheers

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Syd