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Sad Day - end of Windows 7 sales.

VirtualLarry

VirtualLarry

No Lifer
http://techreport.com/news/30903/microsoft-ends-oem-sales-of-windows-7-professional-and-windows-8-1

No more Windows 7 Pro OEM sales, nor Win8.1, apparently.

Time for Assimilation!!!

Edit: Does anyone know how this applies to "downgrade rights"? Will you still be able to buy OEM systems with a Win10 Pro license, but with Win7 Pro pre-installed?

The laptop I'm typing this on, was sold as a Win 8.1 Pro license, with Win7 Pro pre-installed with downgrade rights. Unfortunately, the OEM provided NO WAY to legally re-install this copy of Win7.

Lenvo included Win 8.1 install media, and the pre-installed Win7 does NOT include bootable re-install media creation tools. I tried their Lenovo System backup, which purports to back up the system to a USB stick, but it's not bootable. You have to use the "Novo button" to power on the system, into Lenovo Recovery, but that feature doesn't restore from the USB stick, unless the recovery partition is already present on the HDD. No bare-metal restore capability. (Which I tested when I swapped in an SSD, and tried to use the "Lenovo Recovery" to recover the OS from the USB drive to the fresh SSD.)

Edit: Oh, there's no Win7 OEM license key sticker, either.
 
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On one hand it is sad but on the other it wasn't like the OEM cost of W7pro was ever really coming down in price. In fact, I think because of the crappy Win8.x and W10 some people felt that this only reinforced the demand for and support the price of W7. I have VMs of W8.1/W10 and I will just use them as play things and not for host OS. I'd much rather be forced onto LM than W10. But paying $130-140 for an OEM copy of a 7 year old OS is nuts.
 
BarkingGhostar said:
On one hand it is sad but on the other it wasn't like the OEM cost of W7pro was ever really coming down in price. In fact, I think because of the crappy Win8.x and W10 some people felt that this only reinforced the demand for and support the price of W7. I have VMs of W8.1/W10 and I will just use them as play things and not for host OS. I'd much rather be forced onto LM than W10. But paying $130-140 for an OEM copy of a 7 year old OS is nuts.
Click to expand...

Software doesn't follow supply/demand rules and there's no competition. As long as the single source for keys (Microsoft) wants to keep selling the product, they set the price.
 
I'm still sadden buy having to pay $130-140 for a licensed copy of a 7 year old OS if I want another license. But I have already trained myself that W7 is the last M$ OS in my home. I've been using LM for the past three years to train me on the powder milk.
 
VirtualLarry said:
http://techreport.com/news/30903/microsoft-ends-oem-sales-of-windows-7-professional-and-windows-8-1

No more Windows 7 Pro OEM sales, nor Win8.1, apparently.

Time for Assimilation!!!

Edit: Does anyone know how this applies to "downgrade rights"? Will you still be able to buy OEM systems with a Win10 Pro license, but with Win7 Pro pre-installed?
**snip**
Edit: Oh, there's no Win7 OEM license key sticker, either.
Click to expand...

Generally you would use any Win7 key/media that you have and it either
1) will activate automatically
2) If have to do phone activation, when calling you say that you are evoking the downgrade rights

As for OEMs that ship with Win10 license and downgrade automatically, I believe they still can do it that way
 
I wouldn't care, except that I'm not ready to "just give up" my two Silly-Dust HDHR' triple-tuners and Media Center. I've prepared the household with dual-boot systems. the fam-damn-ily isn't all goo-gah about Windows 10, even if they have the option of just trying it to get their toes wet.

Meanwhile, I think I'll migrate a Hauppauge HVR-2250 card to my Skylake to try it in Win 10 for unencrypted OTA broadcasts, maybe with something like KODI or Media Portal. There shouldn't be any DRM hurdles with OTA.

You never can tell, though. I was asking myself rhetorically 15 years ago "why would anyone pay for bottled drinking water?" Will we be paying for clean air in a canister 20 years from now? I just assume that there's no end in sight for free OTA television. But who can say for sure?
 
There's always other ways to get it I suppose. 😛

But really this is simply a wakeup call to start looking into Linux... or God forbid, Mac.
 
Like others noted, I have no investment in Windows 7 at this point except for my Media Center PC, and I'm working on moving that forward to Windows 8.1. I'm hoping that carries me forward until an something that can work as effectively arrives (ATSC 3.0 can't get here soon enough).
 
Overrated OS is overrated.
7 is malware-prone and not feature-rich for the price. Oh, and 8's task manager is MUCH better.



Linux is for fiddlers who can google fu their way out of problems or have such a basic usage pattern of just web browsers.
 
VirtualLarry said:
Hardly. Win10 is more malware-prone, or exploit-prone, or what have you. At least, I never had any security breeches that I know of, all the time I was using Win7, but within two months of using Win10, I was somehow exploited.
Click to expand...

hey now! MS calls those malwares and exploits features.
 
Win10 basically IS malware lol. So if you accidentally get more, oh well, it's just adding new features!

But you can firewall the hell out of all that crap, my biggest complaint with 10 is the ugly GUI that you can't really customize. What the hell Microsoft? Even windows 3.1 you could customize the GUI to your heart's content. Ironicly it was not as ugly and hard on the eyes so the defaults were fine. It was fine until XP, but at least you could do classic mode in XP, and also in 7. Then they just randomly took that out for no reason. You basically get like two choices, a super dark theme or super blindingly white theme. The gray text on white makes it even worse.

Someone should write a whole new shell that runs on top of Windows, kinda like how there are different desktop environments in Linux.
 
VirtualLarry said:
Hardly. Win10 is more malware-prone, or exploit-prone, or what have you. At least, I never had any security breeches that I know of, all the time I was using Win7, but within two months of using Win10, I was somehow exploited.
Click to expand...
I don't use 10. Win7 wound up with background garbage and I had to scan and clean it up with spyware removal programs and I barely used that computer. Like a month.

8 and 8.1 has yet to have any bizzare background infestations for me.

In fact, bringing back the Start button with no menu in 8.1 has become annoying for me after using 8 for the longest time when using a mouse.
 
Also, 8 was great for the mere reason that the license was more transferable and you could use it for yourself. It was the most affordable legal licenses for Windows. Compared to the ridiculous price for 7 ultimate, 8 Pro was a huge bargain no one wanted because of unwillingness to use a simple start menu program.
 
Windows 10 Pro all the way for me. Windows 7 was a great OS back in the day but unfortunately I feel the end is approaching if you want any decent support and compatibility for newer hardware its time to move on.
 
It's not a sad day, it's a great day.

Windows' legacy support is sometimes a virtue, but it's increasingly one of the platform's greatest vices. Sure, it's neat that your brand new PC can run an OS released in 2009. It's not so hot to realize that hardware and software makers may have to dilute features to make sure products run on Windows 7, or that the older OS may be vulnerable to exploits that were fixed in later releases (see: that recent bug that Google disclosed before Microsoft was ready). It'd be nice if Microsoft was a little more ruthless and dropped older operating systems more quickly.

That's not to say that Microsoft should go full-on Apple and make it difficult to use new features and services if you aren't running the latest and greatest OS, just that it could likely strike a better balance between its lingering legacy-support-at-all-costs strategy and what Apple does.
 
Commodus said:
That's not to say that Microsoft should go full-on Apple and make it difficult to use new features and services if you aren't running the latest and greatest OS, just that it could likely strike a better balance between its lingering legacy-support-at-all-costs strategy and what Apple does.
Click to expand...

There's a reason that Microsoft is standard for business desktops. Their legacy compatibility, that you decry, is a big part of that.
 
VirtualLarry said:
There's a reason that Microsoft is standard for business desktops. Their legacy compatibility, that you decry, is a big part of that.
Click to expand...

I know, but it's also the reason why PC sales are declining, and why Microsoft is forced to think about supporting apps that are 10-plus years old. You see companies that are still holding on to Windows XP systems because they were conditioned to believe they could run some ancient database app for all eternity. Windows 7's XP Mode exists solely because of those sorts of customers, and there's a very real chance that many of those customers are hanging on to Windows 7 as long as they can still buy new computers that support it.

That and in the modern security era, legacy is a problem. At a certain point, you have to improve security through fundamental changes in how an OS works, and that can't always happen if you have to run software that's over a decade old.
 
What often happens in the business world, is they refuse to use open source and want to use something that is proprietary and "supported". Then that backfires because the company no longer exists, now they have to keep this ancient piece of software running on whatever OS it was installed on. Plenty of NT4 stuff at my hospital and even a SCO Unix box, Like the real SCO Unix.

But even without that, it just costs a lot of time and grief to upgrade desktop OS in a business environment so idealy you want to get like 5-10 years out of a system. XP's life was a good length, 7 seems like it just kinda flew by and then they started to push 8 and 10, when people were barely even off XP. It takes several years of planning and testing just to upgrade, then it can take months to a year to do the actual upgrade. By the time you do all that Ms is now trying to convince you to upgrade again! Nuts really.
 
Commodus said:
I know, but it's also the reason why PC sales are declining

That and in the modern security era, legacy is a problem. At a certain point, you have to improve security through fundamental changes in how an OS works, and that can't always happen if you have to run software that's over a decade old.
Click to expand...
No, the reason that PC sales are declining, is not because of legacy support, it's because "The New Windows" (aka Windows 10) sucks. Spying, lack of user control over updates, hybrid UI that looks like it was designed by a toddler, etc.

They could have just secured the kernel and driver layer better, and released Windows 7 SE.It wouldn't have required apps to change all that much.

Heck, most non-driver apps still run unchanged, on both Windows 7 and Windows 10.

New, just for the sake of New, sucks. Especially when there was nothing wrong with the Old.
 
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