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18 Jan 20

I’m an Apple boy through and through. But as part of both my personal and professional lives I do use Windows. One, because some apps only works on Windows, and two, my media centre PC at home is Windows, because it just works better for that function.

I’m all up in Windows 10 now but on January 14th of 2020 Windows 7 reached end of life. A day that saddens me? Why you ask? Because it was frickin’ awesome!

As you may or may not know I have a history in IT support which in my ‘baby’ days centred around Windows NT, yes NT, I’m older than you think.

We soon moved over to XP, which was a revolution (please tell me that XP wasn’t cool). But then it came… Vista!

If you’ve ever had to deal with Vista, either as the OS that came with your new PC or you chose as a crazy person to upgrade you’ll sympathise with my pain.

Vista had a lot of problems, relating to performance and general design. As a tech working in IT we bumped Vista completely. The main issue was to due to the resource hungry ‘Aero’ options which should have promoted better interactions with your device. But like I say I was in an IT Support role and due to the varying demands for the software vs hardware we decided, as a department, that Vista would be a no-go. 

We were already in a ‘domain-linked’ environment of which XP adapted to pretty well. We then went on a rampage to remove Vista from all machines in favour of Windows XP, but if this was something you wanted from factory there was actually a cost associated to this. But we went into a partnership with Toshiba who were our supplier at the time (mainly for laptops as portable was they way that the science community was moving towards). XP which was then still fully supported became our OS of choice and it did a damn good job.

Vista, for all intents and purposes was ‘OK’ but caused more issues than were worth is as we had to spend our time installing legacy drivers to get going but their inevitable outcome was that we’d stick with Windows XP for the formidable future.

Then, the announcement of Windows 7, to me what was an admission of the previous OS was a monumental failure. I was intrigued.

On my main machine at work, back in the day I installed the initial Windows 7 and subsequent betas, and they were decent. It was stable, worked well, and I was still able to do all of the tasks I needed to do. Obviously the betas came thick and fast and it remained and still does remain one of best OS installs I have ever used. One reason for running the gauntlet with this is the knowledge that I’d be supporting Windows 7 in the future, especially as there were something that an IT Tech needed to know before a full institutional rollout in order to support it.

If you’ve ever used Windows 7 or had come from XP and Vista you’ll know that it’s probably the most stable OS that Microsoft has ever released. Obviously it still suffered the same security glitches, lack of major service packs as previous Window builds but for me it was enough. And at the time I had not completely moved to Mac OS so I was a happy bean.

Please note that I have totally ignored Windows 8 and 8.1 in this post, that’s because it was bull*** and even more embarrassing that Vista and that’s why I ain’t covering it.

The death of Windows 7 (or as they say, end of life) will bite some users in the arse. As an organisation we have moved to 10 with little detriment but for my home Windows installations I stuck to 7 for as long as I could.

So what do you do, nerds who are holding onto the past? Well, you can pay for extended support which was a feature introduced with Windows XP EOL where institutions such as the NHS in the UK forked out for security updates far beyond the life of the OS but this isn’t for everyone.

So just upgrade right? No! As a previous IT Support geek in a scientific environment certain tech doesn’t work with modern operating systems which put us in kind of a bind so extended support as well as constant review of all of our systems us a real thing, especially when it came to legacy hardware, which generally meant yanking out the network cable and providing patches manually.

If you get to upgrade to the latest and greatest. I tip my hat to you. You are sooo lucky, but please give a thought to those of us who have to support legacy systems to this day. There is honestly as Windows 98 PC in my estate which gives me nightmares.

Mock me as you will, but Windows 7 is dead. What are you doing about it? I’d love to hear!

Windows 7 out!!!

Author

Paul Wright

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