Windows 7 no longer supported.

D1CKL

Club Member
Mar 16, 2009
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Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland
As of yesterday, Microsoft are no longer providing support for Windows 7. My desktop PC currently runs Windows 7 Pro and I suppose I will have to upgrade to Windows 10.
Looked on the Microsoft site and they are looking for £219.99 for Windows 10 Pro. A bit expensive.
Looked on Bay and found prices of £3.49 for Windows 10 Pro, but, no disc, just a license key and download instructions. A bit iffy I suppose.
Any of the Technical guys on here that could point me in the right direction please.(y)
 
Happy to help! A few things:

1) Although Microsoft have stopped extended support for 7, they will provide critial security patches for some years yet, (see the whole Wannacry thing where they demonstrated startling corporate responsibility...)

2) Assuming you're talking about a home computer, you probably don't need the Pro edition. You can go and look up the features, but basically unless you need to join the device to an Active Directory domain or use BitLocker, RDP or HyperV virtualisation, it's a waste of cash. I don't know your use-case though.

3) Assuming your copy of 7 is kosher, Microsoft will still let you download 10 for free; they're just not advertising it. Here's how you go about it. If your copy of 7 isn't kosher, you can buy a genuine license key online for about £10. Or £15 for an 8.1 license.

Hope this helps!
 
^^^yep, what he said :)

Basically, download and install Win 10 and simply activate it using your Win 7 product key, shouldn't cost you a penny (y)
 
It's been pretty much summed up already, but if it's any reassurance, I have clients who have everyone still on Windows 7 and expect to be so for a while. Their franchise dictates that they cannot use Internet Explorer 11 or Edge to access an OEM Extranet, so we keep them on 7 until there is an application update...
 
One of my laptops runs Vista, they gave up support for that years ago but it’s still fine 95% of the time. I can hear Mako and Foobar cringing as they read this !
 
Ahh Cheers Foobar. Correction, it was the old desktop ( now retired ) that had Vista, the old laptop is on XP and will get forscan on it when I finally get the urge to sort it.
 
Win10 has been a free download/update for a couple of years now, if you have win7> iirc. When i bought my lappy a few years back with the "NEW" Win8.1 and within a few days of use received the popup for win10, after checking for spyware etc and visiting the site. i installed it and i now have it on both lappys but the old PC still runs on XP ;)
 
I have a desktop still on Vista and a laptop on win 8. I have no issues . . .
At work they just did our upgrade from 7 to 10 which went remarkably smoothly, surprise.
 
The official line from Microsoft was that if you adopted Windows 10 early on, it would be free, but only for a limited time. However, this is not quite as it has turned out, hence the confusion...
 
Unless you rely on any specific Windows software, don't discount Linux as a replacement for Win7 either. The installers for some of the top versions (distros) of Linux are pretty much click and go these days. I installed Linux Mint on my old laptop and it was up and running within 30 minutes. A good option if your old hardware may struggle with Windows 10. (y)
 
That's excellent advice John. Both my son and younger daughter are running Linux with great success. My daughter's hard drive has just died and she is going to install just Linux this time and no dual boot for Windows at all. I have had intermittent success, but with using Linux as a server, and then only as I have had to leave it to do other things. It has always been a pleasure to use and every bit of hardware I plug in to it just installs its drivers without effort. The only slightly tricky bit I've found is getting partition sizes right at the outset, but then I have a different setup. As I think you infer, when you say 'these days', this was not always the case. It used to be like learning Icelandic, but things have changed dramatically.

Free software like Firefox and OpenOffice / LibreOffice mean that to most intents and purposes, it looks, feels and works like windows. Definitely worth a try and it looks like there are a few on here who would be able to help / assist. I found the Debian Forum on Facebook a complete reverse of the usual FB aggro, with helpful, thoughtful, patient and polite people there willing to help me. ( I know that's weird isn't it ! ) So like John says, give it a try !
 
I agree with John. My sofa-surfing laptop was ex-Scania corporate with a vanilla-ish 7 build on it. When its hard drive crashed, I slapped in a spare and realised that I didn't have the 7 license key for it. So I installed Ubuntu and wrote a thread about it.
 
Yes, you can pick up an old laptop that won't run windows anymore, that was slow, low on memory, with a mechanical hard drive and old processor and it will load all the correct drivers and simply fly along !

You may have seen these 'USB Stick Upgrades' that will speed up an old PC or laptop. All they are is bootable Linux on a USB stick that effectively replaces your operating system. Bearing in mind that USB sticks are not that fast, it just goes to show what an unecessary burden windows can be for your hardware. Hardware is always getting faster, but somehow windows finds a way to suck the life out of it for little gain...
 
Windows 7 officially may be at the end of it's life, but it still does exactly what I need for freelance work and music production. I can't see myself changing from it. Security is obviously a key aspect of upgrading, but with decent enough anti-virus protection, there shouldn't be anything to worry about.
 
Most security exposure comes down to being tricked into visiting a site that has the payload.

If you're careful about where you go, these risks are mostly de-fanged.
 
Vonny was just greeted by this:

I told her to click on "sod off and don't remind me again". Win7 is more than adequate for her applications and I make sure her AV and anti-malware etc are up to date.
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Sent from my Xperia 10 using Tapitap
 
Spot on Al. As opposed to the 'Scare me some more' and 'Wear me down by attrition' options that I also see on that screen. Has Microsoft considered that they might be the source of the malicious software ?
 
Yes Chris, I am just going to stick with Windows 7 at the moment. I have good AV software so I have nothing to worry about at the moment. I will probably upgrade to Windows 10 when I have more time on my hands.