Will they try to force Windows 10 on people?

GunJack

Ben84 wrote: »

Windows 7 and 8 will I expect continue to be useful and functional for many years yet.
W7 is supported until 2020, the Enterprise version I suspect will be for a while longer - many businesses (large and small) have only just gone over to 7,


A large proportion of Windows installations expire from complete lack of maintenance after about 2 years, often because they're full of malware and the hard drive is full.

with respect, what tosh!! the installations don't "expire". Yes, they may (and often do) need some maintenance, but you wouldn't expect a car to go on forever without servicing it, would you?

And in my experience, having automatic updates set has caused me to have to rebuild no end of machines after the user has hard-powered-off "because it was being so slow I had to hold down the power button to turn it off", i.e. it was trying to run the scheduled defrag (on by default, should always turn it off and run manually) and install updates at the same time....

..but never has one expired yet......

stockton_2

I never have automatic updates and I have never yet had a problem resulting from this. With Windows XP I just added the service packs as they became available.

I systematically purge my computer of unwanted files as part of a regular maintenance procedure.

Problems I have with my computer are usually a result of visiting what appear to be genuine sites and finding they have unleashed some adware or bloat programs on my computer.

Ben84

henm2 wrote: »

Of course if you used a good linux based system like Linux Mint or Ubuntu as your operating system instead you would not have that sort of hassle.

I use openSUSE, and malware and such isn't really an issue. In theory, Linux could have malware, but it seems pretty robust for security and isn't really popular enough to target, so Linux users seem to be getting away with an easy life on this aspect. With some care however, Windows users can mostly avoid it too, but it takes a more active effort.

Ben84

GunJack wrote: »

with respect, what tosh!! the installations don't "expire". Yes, they may (and often do) need some maintenance, but you wouldn't expect a car to go on forever without servicing it, would you?

By expire I mean break, fail, or really any other word that describes "doesn't work any more". A Windows computer that is never maintained with anti-virus/malware software, and never has the hard drives cleared out once in a while and defragmented, tends in my experieince to become a door stop after about two years. I'm not surprised by this, and I don't think it's a failing in Windows, I'm just describing what happens. If lots of people were driving around for years without ever lifting their bonnets until they broke down, and I said the cars were expiring from complete lack of maintenance, would that be an unfair description?