No Windows 7 support in 2020.

[TheForce]

I just got an advisory that TurboTax for 2019 will not run on windows 7 computers. Intuit said to continue to use Turbotax next year on Win 7 computers will require use of the internet version but not the hard local copy you download or buy on disk. The reason they gave is that Microsoft will not be supporting win 7 in 2020 for any more updates or security support.

I also wonder how many other software packages will be dropping win 7 compatibility next year. I suspect I will be seeing Quicken get the same advisory.

I did retire one win 7 only computer early last year. It was an i5 slow poke but otherwise ran fine. The one I use daily is a win 7 but I also installed a win 10 OS on it's own SSD a year ago to get ready for this day. The only reason I maintained win 7 on this i7-950 computer is because it has a virtual windows XP OS installed for some legacy software I still use at times. Mostly to open old files that won't run on newer OS.

 

[Magic Static]

I hate being forced into a new Windows version. I always lose software and hardware to the change. This time I lose my laptop, it won't do win 10. But I have a MiniHP with an Intel Atom processor and 1g DDR2 ram that loaded and runs Win 10. So I bumped it up to max two gigs of ram My desktop runs circles around most machines and will be the last to switch. But I will keep the Win7 SSD and install a new drive for Win10 like TheForce has done. Good reason to upgrade the drive

 

[Foxbat]

For the folks that need to keep a copy of Windows 7 around, I'd set up Virtual Box with a Win 7 VM now (while you still can) and use it as you need to.

Hell, we're still trying to pry Windows XP from our Process guys. They never paid for the software vendor's updates so to move to Windows 7 (let alone 10) version of their software will be big bucks. After January, no Windows 7 boxes will be allowed Internet access and will need to be configured in ACL-protected VLANs.

Oh, yeah, and because of all the uncertainty in the Global Economy, we can't spend money on new PCs, so we're taking the better of the replaced desktops and redeploying them with Windows 10. Microsoft may have to extend the deadline another year to help businesses like ours who have had to slash discretionary spending.

 

[Magic Static]

After January, no Windows 7 boxes will be allowed Internet access and will need to be configured in ACL-protected VLANs.

That statement has a lot of implications. Where did you learn this?

 

[KE4EST]

That statement has a lot of implications. Where did you learn this?

At his company.

 

[harshness]

Microsoft is understandably incensed that so many aren't upgrading but they have only themselves to blame for creating the monster that is Windows 10 with all of its ongoing changes and hard-nosed impositions.

I have a couple of pieces of shareware software that i use on a home Pee Cee that may or may not run on Windows 10 and that's pretty much all I use Windows for outside of H&R Block's installable tax software for about 30 minutes a year. I'll find out if I have to upgrade some time in the Fall but at this point, the software requirements still list Windows 7.

In the enterprise, I'm not so worried about what Microsoft thinks as I've consciously stayed away from products that are on some manner of forced update. I don't see virtual machines running on servers as an option but I've used Remote Desktop or VNC in some situations to get around not being able to "install" infrequently-used software on a machine. I use LibreOffice so I'm not under the thumb of Redmond and I can't overstate how freeing that is.

 

[navychop]

Well, we won’t have to worry about Windows 11!


Sent from my iPhone using SatelliteGuys App. For now.

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

My company will be paying for extended support through 2023 for Windows 7 as one of their main real estate packages is STILL not certified for Windows 10 yet.

Helping customers shift to a modern desktop - Microsoft 365 Blog

 

[Foxbat]

That statement has a lot of implications. Where did you learn this?

This is our internal company policy, not Microsoft's. They really want us to meet our target of January 2020!

 

[harshness]

Well, we won’t have to worry about Windows 11!

While that's clearly the plan, I'm not sure it is a workable one. Having to keep track of which build you have (similar to what Mac users must to suffer with dot versions) or 32/64 bittedness is not something that any end user should have to endure.

If you're running Windows 10 but you can't run an off-the-shelf Windows 10 title because you have too new or too old of a build there will be hell to pay. I imagine that's why Microsoft is encouraging users to do apps instead of applications but I firmly believe that some software just won't fly in an app environment (CAD, media editing, Graphic Design, etc).

 

[TheForce]

I just got a rude reminder of a problem I had in the past. This windows 7 machine has an SSD with win 7 and everything runs great. About 2 years ago I wanted to run a win 10 video editing software so I thought just add a second SSD with win 10 OS on it and then boot up with the new SSD. Well it began to do a CHKDSK and then deleted every file on my data drives. I thought no harm done so let it finish. In the end my data drives were erased, calling to be formatted. I recovered them with long deep scan with File Scavenger a 4TB drive takes about 2 days to recover. So present day I forgot to disconnect the data drives and rebooted the computer with win 10 SSD connected and while it booted the C drive, I had no data drives. Went back into the win 7 and they were deleted. Every damn file. So now I'm running file scavenger on 8 TB of data.

For some reason a hardware switch of the C drive OS causes my data drives to delete it's files. I ran this problem by many IT techs 2 years ago and nobody could give me a straight answer on why this doesn't work. I have a feeling it has something to do with the Microsoft security protocol in win 10.

I will eventually get everything switched over to win 10 on this computer. But I may need to do a manual transfer of all the data on 16 TB of video files to hard drives that were installed and formatted with win 10. The good news is that I still have the win 7 running fine and have successfully installed Office 365 and Quicken on my new video editing computer.

BTW- Running win7 in a virtual machine won't work as I really only need the Virtual Machine for two programs that run in windows XP. They are 16 bit software. Fortunately, a programmer in Germany wrote a replacement program for a program called cardfile that runs in windows 10. I began storing contacts in that Rolidex look alike back when windows 3.0 came out and like it. Quicken 95 was working fine for me since it came out but in January I decided to make the upgrade to the subscription Quicken. Took a weekend to get everything set up but now I like it' I still have older account files on Quicken 95 that I need windows XP to access.

 

[harshness]

This sounds like a case of secure boot malfeasance. Multibooting Windows is much more of a crap shoot since the advent of secure booting so if you're going to install multiple perversions of Windows in the future, you should avoid using secure boot. You might want to avoid UEFI too (though this may cause grief with the latest hardware -- consult your computer builder).

I use network storage where possible so Windows doesn't get the false impression that it owns everything. Windows 10 may try to seize USB drives that are available at boot so that's probably not a good defense.

XP runs nicely in a virtual machine but there may be some limitations for software that runs close to the hardware. VMs have the benefit of handling things like changes in NTFS that Windows XP doesn't natively support.

 

[TheForce]

Well, so far my file scavenger is doing its job and rebuilding the entire drive tree to another hard drive.

I think that once I migrate all my apps and programs to win10, I will rebuild new initialized data drives in win10 as I won't need but one small data drive for win 7. Then just physically connect and disconnect the drives when I have to access the other OS.

I will research the network storage idea.

 

[Lone Gunman]

Hummm, I joined the "Insider" program with the beta release of Win 10 back in 2015. I started out running it on two multi-boot desktop systems I have and the only initial problem with it was that Win 10 set a "dirty flag" on every other drive in that box except Linux every time I booted up 10, and, at that time where were 6 other drives in one and 5 drives in the other, all with various Windowz/Linux operating systems on'em.

That meant that every time I booted 10 with the other drives connected, I would have to run check disk on each one when I booted from them again. They finally found a work around for this problem with a setting in Power options by just unchecking "Fast Startup". At some point they did actually fix this problem as I haven't had to disable Fast Startup in probably a couple of years now.

But as far as data loss goes? I've never had that happen with any multi drive system I have and Win 10?? The multi-boot systems I have are all built on Asus P5Q Pro P45 chipset motherboards, which were new back in 2009. Back about 3+ years ago I did upgrade those boards to some cheap fleabay Xeon 5460 socket 771 CPUs and also upgraded them to 8GB of DDR2 and they have worked flawlessly since. If I would have had those data loss problems with 10, I would have "S" canned it long ago!

Box A
Windows XP Pro w/D partition
Windows XP Pro x64 w/D partition
Windows Vista Ultimate x64
Windows Vista Ultimate x64 w/D partition
Windows 7 Ultimate x64 w/D partition
Windows 10 Pro x64 EIDE
Linux Mint 17.3 x64 EIDE
linux Mint 19.1 x64 on a 30GB mSATA SSD

Box B
Windows XP Pro x64 w/D partition
Windows Vista Ultimate x64 EIDE
Windows 7 x64 w/D partition
Windows 10 Pro x64 EIDE
Linux mint 18.3 x64 on a 30GB mSATA SSD

 

[TheForce]

The data loss happened when I allowed the chkdsk to run on all the drives at bootup. Finally when booted all data drives were wiped clean and requested reformatting. I could only see them in Disk Manager. I actuallt only lost 2 of the 4 drives because I aborted the final two. I'm sure they would have been wiped too had I allowed the process to continue. I have recovered all the data with very few losses on the 2 wiped drives using deep scan analysis on Fila Scavenger. That takes about 12 hours, then the recovery process to another 4TB drive takes an additional 24 to 30 hours.

My system does not use a single partitioned drive for the boot drive. Instead, I have two physical SSD 500GB C drives for the two operating systems and I power down and switch the SATA cable, and select the new boot drive in Bios. It's been a trouble free process as long as I prevent chkdsk from running. Right now I have all current data files and programs updated on the win10 system and it works fine. I need to reboot to win 7 soon to access my windows XP virtual machine for a 16 bit program that I have to do some work on. Should be OK as long as I avoid chkdsk or just unplug all the data drives. Once I complete my work I will just save to a flash drive and use that file in win 10.

If I can ever figure out how to get my windows 10 computers to see the shared data drives on my ethernet Lan, things should be perfect. The win 7 computer sees them and even my iMac sees them but win 10 computers doesn't see any drives, files folders that are shared.

 

[Neutron]

My work laptop is Windows 10. It’s the only Windows machine in our house as I loathe Microsoft. I miss the days of 3.1 and NT and even DOS.

Our home computer is an iMac. I also run an Ubuntu VM.

 

[navychop]

I look forward to getting back into Mint, after I retire.

And I’m glad to see so many others eating MicroSoft’s lunch.


Sent from my iPhone using SatelliteGuys App. For now.

 

[Neutron]

A few of the others in IT including two of my coworkers use a MacBook Pro for their jobs and I asked if I could get one but my boss told me they were trying to avoid ordering them. I’d much rather use a Mac for my work machine, especially since I script most of my projects now.

 

[harshness]

I’d much rather use a Mac for my work machine, especially since I script most of my projects now.

Why use such an expensive computer to do things that you could do with a much cheaper computer?

My beef about the Mac Books is that the screens are waaaay to small. I don't care how sharp or colorful they are if I have to squint to read the display. Might as well use a Chromebook as they cost 10-25% the price.

 

[Neutron]

No Google OS for me.

My reasoning for a MacBook is the quality of the hardware and software. My Dell Precision laptop has been less reliable than our Mac at home. I’m also not a big fan of Windows 10 either.