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Microsoft: Windows 7 Does Not Meet the Demands of Modern Technology; Recommends Windows 10 (neowin.net)
In a blog post, Microsoft says that continued usage of Windows 7 increases maintenance and operating costs for businesses. Furthermore, time is needlessly wasted on combating malware attacks that could have been avoided by upgrading to Windows 10. A report on Neowin adds: Microsoft also says that many hardware manufacturers do not provide drivers for Windows 7 any longer, and many developers and companies refrain from releasing programs on the outdated operating system. Markus Nitschke, Head of Windows at Microsoft Germany, had the following to say about Windows 7: "Today, it [Windows 7] does not meet the requirements of modern technology, nor the high security requirements of IT departments. As early as in Windows XP, we saw that companies should take early steps to avoid future risks or costs. With Windows 10, we offer our customers the highest level of security and functionality at the cutting edge.
"We still REALLY want to get you on Win 10. Our tricks and coercions did not work very well so anything we can do to scare you over is a good thing".
I suspect there is some truth to what they say, but the reality is that Windows 10 has had many unstable updates. Companies can turn these off or defer them, but the home user has no recourse. And for mission critical applications, Windows 10 has shown to be not reliable as you never know when an update that you can't eliminate might break your system.
The telemetry malware has been backported to 7.
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BMO
Microsoft believes that our PCs belong to them. They need to lose more market share.
The Windows app store is not something that we all want. It should be an optional add-on for all versions of Windows.
Some of us also like Aero. Windows 8 removed Aero simply because mobile devices could not run it well in Windows RT. We are asked to give up Aero solely because of Microsoft's mobile platform that failed in the market and was essentially discontinued.
Microsoft, we refuse.
I don't know how this stuff gets modded up. Windows/10 has everything that was in EMET by default plus a bunch of new features that prevent bugs from becoming exploits. It clearly is superior in terms of third-party hacking. The price you pay is either money (Enterprise Version) or Telemetry (Home/Pro versions). You may not think it's worth the cost, but pretending that the features don't exist (or being ignorant of them) doesn't add any value.
While true they have come in the way of updates that can be uninstalled: https://gist.github.com/xvitaly/eafa75ed2cb79b3bd4e9
Further Win 7 does not include any of the Win 8 UI elements. Trying to mash a touchscreen UI onto a desktop OS. As well as since you don't have the "tile" elements you are not being served ads nativly on your desktop or start menu. (They did sneak the Win 10 upgrade ad into the Systray but since there is no MS Edge for Win 7 you don't see the ads that pop up there on Win 7.)
Win 7 does offer control on how your updates are done. Not a native option for non-enterprise Win 10 users.
Finally I've yet to see any real hardware issues with Win 7 that this blog post purports. The very closest thing that I will say is that there are some new Win 8+ kernel SSD bits of functionality that you can't get with Win 7 at all. However those bits of functionality are not a dealbreaker to me, an avid SSD user, by any means.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
They weren't late, they were one of the first, but got caught with the NSAKey debacle.
After that they had to regain trust (of those paying attention).
Some of us have stopped updating Windows 7 for exactly this sort of reasons.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
If you disable the "recommended updates" you don't appear to get any of the "old" telemetry - but it may all be back in the rollups and we would never know.
The old telemetry updates could be removed with the following:
wusa /uninstall /kb:Patch# /quiet /norestart
The patches to remove are: 3065988, 3083325,3083324, 2976978, 3075853, 3065987, 3050265, 3050267, 3075851, 2902907, 3068708, 3022345, 2952664, 2990214, 3035583, 971033, 3021917, 3044374, 3046480, 3075249, 3080149.
There are some things you can do. Opt out of Customer Experience Improvement and disable Diagnostics Tracking Service.
http://windowsitpro.com/windows-10/how-turn-telemetry-windows-7-8-and-windows-10
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
All proprietary software should be suspected of being malware. Microsoft Windows before version 10 was known to not behave in the user's interest and certainly not in the user's control (as per the definition of proprietary software). Microsoft tried pushing a Windows 10 "upgrade" on users by force, for example. Other "features" in Windows 10 (such as ignoring a user's privacy settings and doing what is in Microsoft's interest) were simply more along this line. Microsoft's aggressive sales tactics pointed to in this /. story are another example. In time there will be an announcement that Windows 7 will no longer receive updates and the hard sell for Windows 10 (or some other Windows variant) will continue. The question for all Windows users is how much more treatment like this they'd like to receive. It's never been easier to switch to a fully free software OS and run nothing but free software on top of that.
Digital Citizen
You forgot "Microsoft can access your machine and pull anything they want from it at any point in time without your knowledge and/or consent".
You also have zero control of updates. Unless you have a WSUS server, your machine WILL get updates on the schedule Microsoft forces upon you, and if those updates happen to hose your system, then too bad so sad.
I have a small pilot of Windows 10 machines at our company, and the last Anniv. update hosed *all* of them. Some were able to get up and running again by reverting to the previous version. One couldn't even revert, requiring us to re-image the machine.
The problem is that Microsoft wants all the control of your computer, but none of the responsibility. Maybe that's all well and good for home users, since the average home user wouldn't know what to do anyway, but for professional users and administrators who (for whatever reason) don't have the benefit of WSUS, that is *absolutely* unacceptable.
Perhaps people don't freak out because you are wrong?
I can't comment on systems using apt, but for yum: my CentOS installations use either a local repository or they connect to a mirror. No "central server".
Also, I don't think that they query the yum server for every package installed on the system: instead, they download a single file that lists all the available packages in that particular repository, then they download only the necessary packages.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Its trivial to avoid the backporting to Windows 7, when it comes to Windows "all ur data belongs to us" 10? Many men much smarter than you or I have tried, none have succeeded to remove the spying from Windows 10, its just baked in too deep.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
It can be turned back down to near the old level simply by setting it to "Basic."
The old telemetry system was opt-in. The new one isn't even opt-out. Setting it to "Basic" only reduces the amount of data being sent, it does not stop it.
I think it goes further in that Microsoft is most likely intentionally sabotaging Windows 7. It seems that almost every Windows 7 computer I encounter has svchost.exe fully consuming a CPU core and consuming massive amounts of memory for no reason other than a failed update.
This issue is because the dependency resolution algorithm in Windows Update is NP-hard. Its not a big deal until the number of updates gets large, and the dependency graph gets reset every time MSFT releases a service pack. Recently those resets have been done by the Win8-->Win8.1 upgrade and on Win10 every ~6 months they release a new OS image (at time of writing, Win10 TH1-->Win10 TH2-->Win10 RS1, pretty soon we will have RS2, and so on.) So the new Win10 model effectively masks the problem since they will have very frequent resets of the dependency graph now. Also, the cumulative updates further help reduce the growth of that graph. That doesn't help Win7 of course. What they really should do is release a Win7 SP2, reset the dependency graph, and make everyone's life easier, but with how aggressively they are pushing the Win10 upgrade you can bet they won't do anything to make life on Win7 easier.