Is it practical and safe to stick with Windows 7?

I keep Win 7 Ultimate, and don't care what others will say.. I know what I could do on it and as long it is going fine I will work with it. I bought another SSD disk. Bought cheap licence for Win 10 on Livekort.com, and installed Win 10, just because my bank request internet bank on Win 10. I will not use it much. It is to complicated now for me and lot of things I don't need.
I got help with flashing bios for my MSI -B75MA-P45 motherboard and installed new Win 7 in UEFI environment. Some friends told me Win 7 is not designed for UEFI, but with Rufus app I created bootable UEFI Win 7 and no problem on GPT disk. The same was done with Win 10 on Rufus. I installed on separate disks each OS and friend helped me with Ubuntu Grub to get so elegant dual boot Win 7 + Win 10 + Ubuntu (last version-if I like to learn it ..)
I am happy with solutions which gives me freedom to choose.

Old hardware - this is why I have Win7 still installed on a hard drive I can just toss into my drive bay and boot up. I dont use it often but it's there when I need it. Not going to be booted in Win 7 any longer than needed and will not be connected to the "interweb"

How old is your computer? I ask because ... when it's time for a new OS ... it's time for a new computer. The old computer will be too slow for me. And it might perform even worse with the new OS.

Alternatively ... if you're not in need of a new computer, and if Win 7 works okay ... just keep it. The lack of support is largely irrelevant. Just how much support for Win 7 were you getting before? (None. So it doesn't matter.)

Support is overblown. Ignore the doomers.
Just get a new computer when you're ready.

I'll chip in with my 2 cents ... I do use Windows 7 most of the time, for work, banking, private records, you name it. I also have Windows 10 installed on a separate drive, which I use to learn about the OS. As mentioned before, I will have to use Windows 10 when I will get a new computer since most likely new hardware will not cooperate with Windows 7 (simply put, there won't be any Windows 7 drivers for new hardware anymore). So, as long as my current hardware works (it's about 7 years old), I will keep running Windows 7, but eventually I will have to change it. That's why I'm learning Windows 10 now.

In fact, I am already seeing the limitations of Windows 7: recently I got myself a new monitor and while Windows 10 has no problems with it without me actually doing anything, setting up Windows 7 to look decent is a bit of a struggle.

On a side note, that Windows 10 installation on a separate drive works just fine - definitely not slower that Windows 7. Of course, the installation is relatively lightweight at the moment since I haven't installed all the software that I'm normally running, but the OS itself is fairly crisp.

Hi folks

why not run Windows 7 as a VM --these days VM's work very efficiently !!!. And to those who like OE (outlook express) you can still run this on an XP Virtual Machine.

Virtual Machines are an ideal tool for running legacy software (and in some cases legacy / unsupported hardware) I have some old Vinyl Disc cutting hardware with a stidio application for cutting and creating tracks --still works a treat on a legacy VM XP machine --why should I pay > 20,000 USD to replace hardware that I already have and still functions perfectly.

I'm often surprised at how many people who don't want to give up their old OS'es never think of using Virtual Machines. That way you can use the legacy OS until the end of the universe if you want to !!! while still enjoying all the benefits of nice new fast modern hardware etc.

That said I'm really surprised - especially with SSD's how people report W10 is really slow --goodness knows what they run on their machines --I've found all the latest builds of W10 work perfectly with ZERO tinkering (I exclude things like some network settings to connect older devices still using SMB1).

I suppose though the Home edition (I like to call that W10 Toy edition) might have a lot more bloat than the pro Workstation editions that I use.

Nothing though is as fast as a Host Linux system - especially one where you just run it as a headless command line server (witout a GUI) and only install exactly those things you need so the whole thing will easily boot with just a few GB assigned for its system files. Another issue though !!.

Cheers
jimbo

Well, I certainly don't use any third-party "tweakers" or "optimizers". However, I am definitely not comfortable with the way Windows 10 is behaving in the privacy area. I have certainly "opted out" of everything I could find and deactivated the related Tasks. I am also using the Group Policy to ensure Windows 10 does not revert on those settings.

As far as services, I'm not quite sure which one are in fact "essential", in fact, that's what I mean by "learning Windows 10" - learning what's important and what's bloat. As an example, Cortana and anything speech related is certainly bloat to me - my computer doesn't even have a microphone, so it can't respond to speech whatever the Windows settings! I also don't use search, so all search related services are disabled. As far as I'm concerned, this makes the machine faster (no indexing, etc.), but somebody who actually relies on search for whatever tasks would find these services essential (even though personally I can't imagine what those tasks could be).

margrave55 said:

How old is your computer? I ask because ... when it's time for a new OS ... it's time for a new computer. The old computer will be too slow for me. And it might perform even worse with the new OS.

Alternatively ... if you're not in need of a new computer, and if Win 7 works okay ... just keep it. The lack of support is largely irrelevant. Just how much support for Win 7 were you getting before? (None. So it doesn't matter.)

Support is overblown. Ignore the doomers.
Just get a new computer when you're ready.

Totally agree....

It took Vista x64 ( I think I was one of the few people that liked it ) years before it became problematic to run. Eventually, browsers and plugins stopped working and by then I had built my new workstation. Using the vista hardware ( PSU, GPU etc ) as backup troubleshoot hardware.

jimbo45 said:

why not run Windows 7 as a VM

Sounds like a great idea but I fear the process will be beyond my capabilities and I've spent far too long on the W10 install already. I have two HDD's installed in my PC so maybe W7 on one and W10 on the other (as suggested in this thread) would be easier to configure? I guess I'd have the option of either W7 or W10 at boot/startup?

EDIT: Forgot to mention. PC is about three years old and was built for W10. I purchased it without operating system then installed W7 Pro 32bit (from disc purchased separately). It's a Pentium G4400 3.3GHz. Cheap but no slouch.