Microsoft Waves “Early Goodbye” To Windows 7, Pushes Windows 10 Upgrades

Riptide_NVN said:
I can see that working for an existing Win7/8 installation and performing an in place upgrade. But what about a clean install right from Windows 10 media? I'm assuming you don't get a key to just plug in and activate from that link you posted.
Click to expand...

Once you get Windows 10 installed as an upgrade it activates automagically and after that the activation hash is stored on Microsoft's servers forever (or that's how it's supposed to work). If you do a clean install at any point after that on the same hardware it will activate automagically again when you get online and the install connects to Microsoft, says "It's me again, Wonder Twin Powers, ACTIVATE!!!" more or less and voila, it's done in a few seconds with no user interaction required.

People still don't understand how Windows 10 activation works 1.5 years after release? Seriously? :confused:
 
Tiberian said:
Once you get Windows 10 installed as an upgrade
Click to expand...

If I build a new system with new hardware I can't very well use that link to get Windows 10 for free. I need a valid installation of Windows 7/8 in place first before I can then run the upgrade and use Windows 10 on that new hardware.

I don't even have media or keys for those operating systems. So the link isn't going to cut it in my situation.
 
So buy a key for Windows 7 for $12 from the guy here in the For Sale/Trade subforum, they're super cheap in price and the guy (or gal, I have no idea) has pretty good feedback for the sales so far with quite a few sold from what I can gather and apparently he even has Windows 10 Pro keys available as well for only $18:

https://hardforum.com/threads/windo...18-office-2010-home-student-3-pc-140.1919514/

Personally I'd say get a Windows 7 key for less, then install it, do the Windows 10 upgrade, lock in the free activation, then get rid of Windows 10 and go back to Windows 7 but that's just me. There are always solutions, just gotta do some research and discover 'em. ;)
 
Right so with some effort and a few dollars spent it is still possible. Just not "free" and as simple as following a link and running setup.

I'm pretty shocked you can get Win 10 pro keys for $18 but I did do some searching around today and found a few websites selling them for around $36. Not quite that cheap but getting there. I already have the ISO for Win 10 and have no desire to go back to 7. It would probably be worth it to just buy the key for 10, run a clean install, and be done with it. That said I need an excuse to build the new system first. lol
 
We have 9 computers in the home.
Three run Linux.
Three run ESXi.
One runs Mac OS
One runs Linux/Win 7 dual boot
One runs Windows 8 as a HTPC.

Win 10 doesn't have media center = not interested. I have a HD homerun prime for TV and have had it for at least 5 years. Lets see, I can pay Comcrap $20 a month for a DVR and cable box, or $2.95 for a cable card. Plus WMC doesn't suck ass like their guide. Hmmm hard choice haha.

Windows 10 can go pound sand.
 
By the way, does it still work to just input a Windows 7 key when installing Windows 10?
 
DPI said:
So, if I stick with Windows 7, or 8.1 with a start menu replacement, I'll miss out on such amazing "new features" as:

(SNIP)

OH THE HUMANITY... How will I live without 10? My computing future has suddenly turned black. I'm tossing cards into a hat now..
Click to expand...

Your sarcasm fails to impress me. Whether you like it or not, Windows 10 is here. And, in three years time, Windows 7 will no longer receive updates, just like Windows XP.

Have multiple monitors? Want to have different scaling for each monitor? Not possible on Windows 7.
 
ZLoth said:
Have multiple monitors? Want to have different scaling for each monitor? Not possible on Windows 7.
Click to expand...

It is kind of funny when people say that Windows 10 offers NOTHING for desktop users but scaling and high DPI monitor support is vastly better and it's something that Microsoft is now updating quite a bit, the Creators Update should improve this even more.
 
SonicTron said:
By the way, does it still work to just input a Windows 7 key when installing Windows 10?
Click to expand...

Yes, I've heard of people doing this to bypass the need to do an upgrade install.
 
Dekoth-E- said:
They still aren't mandatory on Pro so I don't really care. Sorry you aren't going to convince me to give a shit about most home users after supporting them from Win 95-Win XP. If you don't want forced updates, buy Pro.

That said right now for pro users I can't even recommend Win 10 pro because pro it isn't. It is unfortunate because for a while it was pretty darn good.
Click to expand...
First off, I'm not necessarily talking about every home user yahoo. I think automatic updates are a good thing BY DEFAULT. It's for people who depend on their system and need to be able to control when and if which updates go through that there needs to be an option to control them.

Second, what you're telling me runs contrary to everything I've read / heard on Windows 10. You're telling me I have TOTAL control on my updates on Windows 10 Pro? Not 35 days delay, but I choose exactly when and IF I update? So if things are going good today, but there's an update that wrecks my system tomorrow, I can revert back to the previous one? If, in 9 months, that update STILL wrecks my system, I can still just stay off it? I just want to be absolutely clear here.
 
ZLoth said:
Your sarcasm fails to impress me. Whether you like it or not, Windows 10 is here. And, in three years time, Windows 7 will no longer receive updates, just like Windows XP.

Have multiple monitors? Want to have different scaling for each monitor? Not possible on Windows 7.
Click to expand...
Your highroading fails to impress me, in fact it makes me reluctant to consider anything you have to say.

Why would I want different scaling on each monitor? I couldn't think of a more unnecessary feature. Also scaling needs support from the applications. Sure the crappy store metro apps might support scaling. But almost none of the apps I regularly use do. So better scaling in W10 is kind of a meaningless feature.
 
  • Like
Reactions: rat
like this
tetris42 said:
First off, I'm not necessarily talking about every home user yahoo. I think automatic updates are a good thing BY DEFAULT. It's for people who depend on their system and need to be able to control when and if which updates go through that there needs to be an option to control them.

Second, what you're telling me runs contrary to everything I've read / heard on Windows 10. You're telling me I have TOTAL control on my updates on Windows 10 Pro? Not 35 days delay, but I choose exactly when and IF I update? So if things are going good today, but there's an update that wrecks my system tomorrow, I can revert back to the previous one? If, in 9 months, that update STILL wrecks my system, I can still just stay off it? I just want to be absolutely clear here.
Click to expand...

I honestly don't remember as the Group policy bit caused me to revert win 10 back to 7 and frankly I haven't looked at it since. If they did that, then fuck that noise as well. That makes pro not, but more of slightly less gimped home edition and F ms for that. I am of the same mind as you, Pro users paid for the ability to have complete control not the illusion of it. If that doesn't exist then MS has no right calling it pro edition.
 
M76 said:
Your highroading fails to impress me, in fact it makes me reluctant to consider anything you have to say.

Why would I want different scaling on each monitor? I couldn't think of a more unnecessary feature. Also scaling needs support from the applications. Sure the crappy store metro apps might support scaling. But almost none of the apps I regularly use do. So better scaling in W10 is kind of a meaningless feature.
Click to expand...

Yea, there's a lot of wrong in this statement. Mixed monitor scaling has been something talked about for years and has become increasingly an issue due to the wide range on monitor DPIs that exist today. If you have a high DPI monitor laptop connected to a low DPI external monitor for instance, this is a critical feature.
 
While I have no intention to go back to 7 on any of my systems I think it is fair to say that MS has made some big mistakes the last several years. The UI on Windows 8. Removing features that a portion of their user base enjoy and adds value to the system. The telemetry annoyance. It seems like they are just leading us around by the tail.

They can afford to get away with that for a while but sooner or later if they keep on upsetting people it is going to bite them. It may take a while. But it can't go on forever.
 
Dekoth-E- said:
I honestly don't remember as the Group policy bit caused me to revert win 10 back to 7 and frankly I haven't looked at it since. If they did that, then fuck that noise as well. That makes pro not, but more of slightly less gimped home edition and F ms for that. I am of the same mind as you, Pro users paid for the ability to have complete control not the illusion of it. If that doesn't exist then MS has no right calling it pro edition.
Click to expand...
Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think updates are mandatory under any scenario on Pro as well. The most you can do is delay them for up to 35 days. So hey, say if you didn't want the update that removed group policies for example. Well that's just not an option on Pro as far as I understand. You have to take any update they send to you (or never use the internet).
 
Riptide_NVN said:
While I have no intention to go back to 7 on any of my systems I think it is fair to say that MS has made some big mistakes the last several years. The UI on Windows 8. Removing features that a portion of their user base enjoy and adds value to the system. The telemetry annoyance. It seems like they are just leading us around by the tail.

They can afford to get away with that for a while but sooner or later if they keep on upsetting people it is going to bite them. It may take a while. But it can't go on forever.
Click to expand...

I agree and have long said that Microsoft makes plenty of mistakes. However, I think a lot of this has to much more with the PC market, especially on the consumer side, than decisions that Microsoft just whipped out of thin air. The biggest issue in the x86 PC is that while far from dead, new device sales are down close to a 1/3rd from their height in 2011. And the same thing also seems to be effecting Apple now. Selling more and more PC and Windows licenses is now a thing of the past.

So Windows 8 & 10 were created in a world where the driving force of the growth of Windows was over. Windows 10 could be the greatest desktop OS even by the standards of Windows 10's biggest critics, that perspective would have little to no impact on the overall PC market. Aero glass, controlling updates, etc. You say that what Microsoft is driving folks away. I don't see those things causing lots of people to go buy new PCs either. Adding in processes and experience from mobile devices does make a lot of sense if you have to appeal to more and more people whose primary computing experiences are mobile. And while it's easy to say that none of that should impact existing customers, that all of that should just be totally optional and that it can all work like Windows 7, more options are great, but that's more complexity to keep supporting decades old technology that's facing a diminishing base.

So the whole issue is just a lot more complex that Microsoft being totally tone deaf. And it's not like macOS or desktop Linux have found any real gottacha that has significantly change market share distribution, they each have their own issues to deal with as well.
 
I agree with you on all of that.

FWIW they have demonstrated that when the "resistance" is loud enough they are capable of listening. Putting a (modified) start menu back into the picture with Win 10 happened at least in part because their diminished but still significant desktop market base was ready to take up pitchforks and torches over it.
 
I actually like Windows 10. It works for me, I like the design, and damn it's quick as fuck. I get the anti-surveillance argument against Windows 10, but do people realize that whatever info that Microsoft gains from Windows 10 is most likely already being collected by your ISP, email provider, web browser, etc?

If you are that worried about people collecting your data, why are you using Windows anyways?

Politically I'm going to fight against it, but I'm not going to sit here and jump through the hoops necessary to keep people from collecting data.
 
I had to swap over to my win7 gaming system to work yesterday when the SSD in my linux workstation croaked.
What a PITA that was. I had forgotten how "unfriendly" windows was to desktop tasks.
 
Got a chance to reinstall over the weekend, and threw Windows 10 back on the gaming/general purpose desktop... Decided this time to go with the "2016 Enterprise N, LTSB" release of this ... this along with Classic Shell, seems to be tolerable and what I'm looking for to hold off on going back to Windows 7 .
 
Riptide_NVN said:
I agree with you on all of that.

FWIW they have demonstrated that when the "resistance" is loud enough they are capable of listening. Putting a (modified) start menu back into the picture with Win 10 happened at least in part because their diminished but still significant desktop market base was ready to take up pitchforks and torches over it.
Click to expand...

Microsoft does listen, they've done more to make it easier to give feedback on Windows 10 than any prior Windows OS. Clearly they can't do everything and don't. It is a balancing act. And some if it is a bit tougher than with prior versions. Windows 10 updates are cumulative to make iterative development possible, that's really the issue behind the forced updates. And making it easier to delay them was clearly a response to people complaining. However, they obviously didn't go far enough with this in allowing Home users to do the same. I've actually provided feed back to allow this option for Home users.

One thing that did get added in the latest builds, tile folders, that got a ton of feedback. It's been on Windows phones for years and does a lot to help organize tiles and reduces clutter. Even on something that obvious, even for people that like Windows 10, it took MS a long time to add something that had to be obvious because they were already doing it for phones. So it would be nice if they were faster about these things.
 
jlbenedict said:
Got a chance to reinstall over the weekend, and threw Windows 10 back on the gaming/general purpose desktop... Decided this time to go with the "2016 Enterprise N, LTSB" release of this ... this along with Classic Shell, seems to be tolerable and what I'm looking for to hold off on going back to Windows 7 .
Click to expand...
I hope you don't regret that. My LTSB experience was a disaster. It was just not designed to be used as a normal desktop OS.
 
heatlesssun said:
Yea, there's a lot of wrong in this statement. Mixed monitor scaling has been something talked about for years and has become increasingly an issue due to the wide range on monitor DPIs that exist today. If you have a high DPI monitor laptop connected to a low DPI external monitor for instance, this is a critical feature.
Click to expand...
"It was talked about for years"
By whom? And where? I certainly didn't hear about it anywhere. You're the first person I see mentioning something like this.Do you even know someone who uses different DPI on his displays? How does that even work? When you push a window from one monitor to the other, suddenly the dpi changes on it on the fly? What happens when the windows is halfway between the screens? I have some apps that I extend the windows of beyond one monitor.

This different DPI feature sounds like a car supporting different sized wheels on each side.
 
M76 said:
I hope you don't regret that. My LTSB experience was a disaster. It was just not designed to be used as a normal desktop OS.
Click to expand...
Could you elaborate? Or give a link if you've already explained it?
 
All Microsoft needs to do is give us a single place to turn off all telemetry, all data collection, and let us install updates when WE feel like it and most of the resistance would go away. At a minimum, just give us some registry hacks that only power users can do if they are worried about the unwashed masses never doing updates.

Its not fucking hard....they just dont give a shit. So...to hell with them.
 
M76 said:
"It was talked about for years"
By whom? And where? I certainly didn't hear about it anywhere. You're the first person I see mentioning something like this.Do you even know someone who uses different DPI on his displays? How does that even work? When you push a window from one monitor to the other, suddenly the dpi changes on it on the fly? What happens when the windows is halfway between the screens? I have some apps that I extend the windows of beyond one monitor.
Click to expand...

You can easily search the for the subject, yeah, it's particularly been an issue since we started going to trans-1080p screens.

M76 said:
This different DPI feature sounds like a car supporting different sized wheels on each side.
Click to expand...

A very bad analogy. Take a high-DPI laptop, those aren't uncommon these days and connect it to a 24" 1080P monitor, which are very common these days.

If you're going to criticize something this hard, you really need to look into the issue before wailing away.
 
tetris42 said:
Could you elaborate? Or give a link if you've already explained it?
Click to expand...
I elaborated on it in another similar topic, but I don't think I could find where.

Certain apps just wouldn't install on it properly. Or if installed wouldn't run. For example I wasn't able to run photoshop, because it wasn't able to write into a directory it was supposed to write in the programdata or users directory I don't remember which one.
i've had driver issues with my video card. Basically the driver would shut down right after boot. And the only workaround was restarting the device.

But by far the worst was the USB issues. It just wouldn't recognize new devices after a while. Like I couldn't even add an external optical drive, because windows just wouldn't see it.
On about 8 out of 10 boots my mouse wouldn't work unless I unplugged and then reconnected it.

The video card problem was there from basically the start, the USB problem developed later. And got worse gradually.

I even went around seeking advice for these issues, and most of the time people told me it must be a HW issue, but as little surprise to me after installing the pro edition all the issues were gone.
 
Last edited:
Monkey God said:
All Microsoft needs to do is give us a single place to turn off all telemetry, all data collection, and let us install updates when WE feel like it and most of the resistance would go away. At a minimum, just give us some registry hacks that only power users can do if they are worried about the unwashed masses never doing updates.

Its not fucking hard....they just dont give a shit. So...to hell with them.
Click to expand...

Actually the update part is very hard. Windows 10 updates are cumulative, they cannot be installed out of order, that's typically how an agile process that does iterative releases instead big bang releases works.
 
heatlesssun said:
You can easily search the for the subject, yeah, it's particularly been an issue since we started going to trans-1080p screens.



A very bad analogy. Take a high-DPI laptop, those aren't uncommon these days and connect it to a 24" 1080P monitor, which are very common these days.

If you're going to criticize something this hard, you really need to look into the issue before wailing away.
Click to expand...

Look into what? I said I never saw anyone mentioning this issue How can I look into it then?. Show me the articles about this, or at least the dozens of forum posts demanding it from years ago as you say. Then I'll admit it was an important issue to be addressed.

I've been from 2048x1536 to 4K and back to 1440p, I've used WUXGA (1920 x 1200). high dpi laptops as far back as 10 years ago, when full hd resolution was a distant dream to most even on desktop. and in all that time it never occurred to me "how jolly good it would be to have different dpi on my displays"

It's possible that there are some people out there who would use it. We have a saying that goes like this in a rough translation: as long as there is crap, there will be fools to eat it up.

But if this is the best selling point you can come up for Windows10, then you're not going to sell it to many people.
 
jardows said:
Except the games I play aren't available on Linux. And there is no comparable product to Publisher and Access in Linux. I have other programs I use that have no good comparable product in Linux. I have good reasons to stay with recent versions of software, which sometimes remove support for older operating systems, so Windows 7 has no place in my home, not when Windows 10 is practically free. I regretted not going with Windows 8, I won't make that mistake again.
Click to expand...
Why use Access in 2016? Postgres is free you know...
 
M76 said:
But if this is the best selling point you can come up for Windows10, then you're not going to sell it to many people.
Click to expand...

https://www.google.com/#q=windows+high+dpi

If you don't think it's a big deal and never heard of people talk about mixed DPI setups then that's you. The subject is easily searched and it's been talked about here. Yeah, it kind of is a big selling point if you want to use higher resolution displays. It's one reason I can't use 7 anymore. It's not perfect in 10, but the Creators Update seems to be adding another option that will improve legacy apps a lot on this front.
 
heatlesssun said:
https://www.google.com/#q=windows+high+dpi

If you don't think it's a big deal and never heard of people talk about mixed DPI setups then that's you. The subject is easily searched and it's been talked about here. Yeah, it kind of is a big selling point if you want to use higher resolution displays. It's one reason I can't use 7 anymore. It's not perfect in 10, but the Creators Update seems to be adding another option that will improve legacy apps a lot on this front.
Click to expand...

High DPI is not mixed DPI. Also on the first page of your search:

"Microsoft May Never Fix the High DPI Issues in Windows 10"

I think that's what you'd call falling on your own sword.

Seriously I never said there wasn't an improvement in DPI scaling in W10. Yes it is improved, it's one feature that's not worse than in W7, so hooray I guess.

Someone mentions a problem and you mention a non-problem. That's cool, but that still leaves us with the problem.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top