Where's the love for Windows 7?

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Sixthofmay

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Jan 15, 2019
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Not many recent posts here for using Windows 7 for a HTPC server. It's the last Windows OS all the Microsoft spyware patches can be easily removed and costs practically nothing if you buy a used PC from eBay. Just curious.
 

ttabbal

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Mar 10, 2016
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I think most HTPC server people have gone to ZFS or unRaid type storage, so Windows isn't really an option. Client side I expect it would work fine. Even my anti-Windows side has to admit Win7 is a lot better than the previous versions. :)

It's also out of support, so the attack surface gets bigger every day. Most of us are at least a little concerned about security issues. Less of an issue if it's not internet facing, but attacks spread inside a LAN too. Just things to be aware of.
 
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pricklypunter

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It's also out of support, so the attack surface gets bigger every day. Most of us are at least a little concerned about security issues. Less of an issue if it's not internet facing, but attacks spread inside a LAN too. Just things to be aware of.
Extended support doesn't officially end till Jan 2020 if I remember correctly. Until then M$ will continue to provide security updates for it, so it's still plenty safe to use. Given that something like 35-40% of their customers are still actively using Win7 in some form or other, and their absolutely intrusive shambles of a replacement, I don't see many folks giving up on it even at that point.
 
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vl1969

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Feb 5, 2014
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But why?
There is several very viable linux based options that work just as good if not better and cost way less.
Also no hustle of keeping it licenced.
 
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pricklypunter

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But why?
There is several very viable linux based options that work just as good if not better and cost way less.
Also no hustle of keeping it licenced.
I agree, and I for one began going down that route, right after I dumped Win10 beta. I still have and personally use several Win7 boxes, but it will be the last money I ever give M$ for an OS, until such time as they put a stop to all this crap. It's not for everyone though, some folks will be quite happy with whatever M$ comes up with or force feeds them and will likely never dig deeper into alternatives, and that's fine too. Freedom of choice is a wonderful thing...
 

StevenDTX

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Aug 17, 2016
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I still have Windows Media Center NUCs attached to every one of my TVs. Fortunately, they are running Win 10 1809 with WMC 8.8.1 merged into it.

Works great!
 

kapone

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May 23, 2015
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I agree, and I for one began going down that route, right after I dumped Win10 beta. I still have and personally use several Win7 boxes, but it will be the last money I ever give M$ for an OS, until such time as they put a stop to all this crap. It's not for everyone though, some folks will be quite happy with whatever M$ comes up with or force feeds them and will likely never dig deeper into alternatives, and that's fine too. Freedom of choice is a wonderful thing...
Not gonna happen anytime soon... unless...it starts hurting their bottom line.

But..but... Microsoft is "now" a "cloud first" company... their focus is the "cloud/Azure/whatever the next iteration will be...", so they don't give two hoots about Windows. Office is already a paid subscription to an online/SaaS software renting model... and they want Windows to be that way as well!... **** me...

I predict...and my crystal ball may not be perfect, but it doesn't run on Windows... :) that in the not too distant future, Microsoft will come to the "Oh Jesus" (no offense to Christians...not a religious thing...) moment, where they realize that cloud computing is a utility business and the margins are/will be < 3%.

The pendulum will swing the other way then, and suddenly we'll hear...Windows XX!!!! Remagined! Magical! Better than ever! <insert adjective>... for only...$$$

Microsoft is/was a dying business, this whole cloud push is delaying the inevitable.
 

EffrafaxOfWug

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Feb 12, 2015
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cloud computing is a utility business and the margins are/will be < 3%.
The great thing about timesharing systems mainframes thin-clients on externally hosted infrastructure is that you have users over a barrel because migrating outside of the vendor-specific infrastructure is extremely hard and expensive. I doubt margins will ever drop to "commodity computing" levels in such a black-box monoculture, because the alternative to the year-on-year MS price hikes is too much for most companies to contemplate and there's no "100% Azure compatible" platform from a firm that's not MS.

Nothing new under the sun it seems. Meet the new Microsoft, same as the old IBM :)

The concerted push to rent-and-not-own-everything-so-you-relinquish-control has been an obvious trend for at least a decade now, hence why you find so many people with immense distaste for the whole paradigm on this site.
 

ecosse

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Jul 2, 2013
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Its an interest concept to tag a company as "dying" as they vie for being the "world's biggest company". I do think that they are losing focus in areas that might come back to bite them but then what do I know? :)
 

Sixthofmay

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Jan 15, 2019
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Thank you for the comments. I guess one choses what works best for them.

SnapRAID does the same primary function as UnRAID, is free and runs on Windows 7. Combined with Drivepool, I have a nice 96TB server for my HTPC (server built in 2014).

I haven't installed a Microsoft update on any of my 15 or so Windows boxes since 2014. At the same time I changed to Linux for all web browsing. All but one Linux box runs on VMWare VMs. I scan every new Window install with multiple av engines and with free software, first run is done on an island Windows box. Works for me.

I have one Windows 10 laptop. Total waste of money. Almost nothing just works on it so it sits on a shelf. I run Windows 98, 2000, XP, Windows 7, and Linux Mint (Mate). XP is my favorite and VNC into the other boxes.

In 2011 I added RAM to my main XP32 box to make it 8GB. I setup a 5GB Superspeed RAMDisk onto which I have a 5GB pagefile.sys. That and several SSDs make the box faster at most tasks than any of the newer boxes I have.

My next HTPC server uses Windows 7 and Drivepool's replication feature for redundancy. I've purchased the HBAs (Adaptec ASR-52445) and I'm just waiting for the HAMR drives to be released and come down in cost.
 
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DanielWood

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Sep 14, 2018
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Not many recent posts here for using Windows 7 for a HTPC server. It's the last Windows OS all the Microsoft spyware patches can be easily removed and costs practically nothing if you buy a used PC from eBay. Just curious.
Nope, none. As a sysadmin, Windows 7 is the bane of my existence. My goal is to have it eradicated from all my networks by Q3 2019(only a few stragglers). I deal extensively in Powershell, and every time I have to interact with a Windows 7 box and powershell, I hate it. Even with WMF5.1, it is still missing a significant number of newer cmdlets.

I was one of the few people that was really happy when MS announced no more Windows Updates for Win7 on KabyLake/Ryzen. That put a halt to deployments of Windows 7 on all new hardware, no more getting overruled because someone higher up didnt like Windows 10. January 2020 cant come fast enough, so I can disable all Windows 7 computer objects and revoke their 802.1x access.

That all said, I think the Windows 7 GUI was phenomenal and I really dislike the continued removal of easy access to advanced menus on Windows 10.
 
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ttabbal

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Mar 10, 2016
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Yeah, it's nutty that Windows UI got better till 7, then went downhill again. Of course, I think the same thing about many changes to the current version of OSX/MacOS/Whatever they call it tomorrow. With hardware support dead on Win7, I'll probably have to do 10 on any new setups regardless of extended support.

I'm currently only renting Office for one machine. I might install an old version I have floating around and drop it. Not sure yet. I usually just use the free stuff, it's good enough, but the wife really hates anything not Office. shrug.
 

CreoleLakerFan

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Oct 29, 2013
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For a while I was really into building Windows 7 HTPCs. IMO Windows 10 never worked as well with a remote as Windows 7, the shelving of WMC, the death of Amazon unbox/lack of native media streaming clients for Windows ... not to mention Arcsoft BRD player. It just became too much of a hassle.

A few years ago I migrated all of my media clients to Nvidia shield consoles. All of my media is on a NAS, but I have a physical Windows server running Emby on the back end that handles OTA recording, transcoding, library management, etc. Its on Windows because I have an old Nimbie robot that handles batch ripping of DVD/BRD and the software/drivers are only available in Windows versions (to the best of my knowledge).

I still have a project in mind to build a media client to do some Madvr and 3d playback, but that's one of those like to do, probably not until retirement or I have a three week break from work.

All of this to say ... yeah, Windows isn't very relevant for a casual/home user any more.
 

Bert

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Mar 31, 2018
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I still have Windows Media Center NUCs attached to every one of my TVs. Fortunately, they are running Win 10 1809 with WMC 8.8.1 merged into it.

Works great!
How did this actually work? Is there a way to get wmc on win10?

I have win7 box but I find myself mostly using YouTube on the browser and use XBMC to watch DVDs. IIRC, the best thing about WMC was the DVR feature which became defunct. Why do you still use WMC?
 

Bert

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Not gonna happen anytime soon... unless...it starts hurting their bottom line.

But..but... Microsoft is "now" a "cloud first" company... their focus is the "cloud/Azure/whatever the next iteration will be...", so they don't give two hoots about Windows. Office is already a paid subscription to an online/SaaS software renting model... and they want Windows to be that way as well!... **** me...

I predict...and my crystal ball may not be perfect, but it doesn't run on Windows... :) that in the not too distant future, Microsoft will come to the "Oh Jesus" (no offense to Christians...not a religious thing...) moment, where they realize that cloud computing is a utility business and the margins are/will be < 3%.

The pendulum will swing the other way then, and suddenly we'll hear...Windows XX!!!! Remagined! Magical! Better than ever! <insert adjective>... for only...$$$

Microsoft is/was a dying business, this whole cloud push is delaying the inevitable.
MS exec's are not stupid and they all know about the margins. Here is a hint: margins for Office 365 is pretty good and it is the ephitamy of rich client backed by cloud for a killer SaaS solution.
 

StevenDTX

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Aug 17, 2016
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How did this actually work? Is there a way to get wmc on win10?

I have win7 box but I find myself mostly using YouTube on the browser and use XBMC to watch DVDs. IIRC, the best thing about WMC was the DVR feature which became defunct. Why do you still use WMC?
Windows Media Center for Windows 10 - gHacks Tech News

I really, really like the WMC interface (with Emby Vanilla plugin), and I still use it for recording off of an antenna. And most importantly, my better half is used to it and it works well for her.
 

Frank173

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Feb 14, 2018
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Not sure who is dreaming here but Windows 10 overtook Windows 7 and overall commands a very solid market share, even in the corporate market. Here the hard numbers:

According to web analytics vendor Net Applications, Windows 10's share fell by six-tenths of a percentage point in February, ending the month at 40.3% of all personal computers and 46.1% of all PCs running Windows. (The second number is always larger than the first because Windows does not power all personal computers; in February, Windows ran 87% of the world's machines. All but a small fraction of the rest ran macOS, Linux or Chrome OS.)
 

Frank173

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Feb 14, 2018
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Your crystal balls might be wrongly calibrated. Microsoft is on the upswing in so many areas, their company valuations reflect that. Windows 10 has overtaken Windows 7 in terms of market share. They bought the world's largest developer repository, their software OS margins look very juicy from a corporate perspective and they are not only retaining but attractive top talent fron rival firms. Not sure where you see a demise in Microsoft

Not gonna happen anytime soon... unless...it starts hurting their bottom line.

But..but... Microsoft is "now" a "cloud first" company... their focus is the "cloud/Azure/whatever the next iteration will be...", so they don't give two hoots about Windows. Office is already a paid subscription to an online/SaaS software renting model... and they want Windows to be that way as well!... **** me...

I predict...and my crystal ball may not be perfect, but it doesn't run on Windows... :) that in the not too distant future, Microsoft will come to the "Oh Jesus" (no offense to Christians...not a religious thing...) moment, where they realize that cloud computing is a utility business and the margins are/will be < 3%.

The pendulum will swing the other way then, and suddenly we'll hear...Windows XX!!!! Remagined! Magical! Better than ever! <insert adjective>... for only...$$$

Microsoft is/was a dying business, this whole cloud push is delaying the inevitable.
 

Samir

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Jul 21, 2017
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HSV and SFO
The older boxes prior to win10 work pretty well when the install is just frozen in time and never changes by programs like steadystate, rebootrx and timefreez. I've got machines I configured over 5 years ago working just as well as they did back then, and if they don't--reboot and it works again. They're like toasters now.

I'm looking into how I can virtualize these on modern hardware to take advantage of power and space better and still keep the same 'feel' and config for users. I'd just replace their systems with thin clients that directly rdp into their old machines, now virtual. I just don't know how to do this and am doing a lot of reading (which actually brought me here).
 

capn_pineapple

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Aug 28, 2013
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Going back to the HTPC thing.
My NAS stores all of my media.
Due to the age of the NAS (Atom D525), all media management eg capture, processing, organisation, serving etc. is done via containers on another machine.
The one dedicated HTPC I have is running open-elec, all other media devices (chromecasts/tablets/laptops/consoles etc.) are either on Plex or Kodi as applicable.
There's no love for Windows 7 because it's no longer needed, and to be honest, not very good (at least in my personal experience).

When it comes to the business side of things. The ease of management of W10 via powershell or M365 just outweighs any and every inconvenience that comes with W7 of which there are many.
Everything that can be made browser accessible should be, because then the OS is meaningless and can/should be as cheap as possible (whilst maintaining security). The only real reason to keep Windows machines at all is for LoB's that are yet to migrate to being browser based or platform independent (looking at you CAD/Finance/Gaming).