I was surprised to find that one of the old Find-It Centers, which had been shut down years previously, was back up and running on this visit. Well, powered on, at least -- it was sitting on a login screen, and I imagine whatever servers these used to connect to had been dead for ages. It's getting rare to spot Windows 7 in the wild these days (by the time I took this picture, even Windows 10 was out of mainstream support), though I know some people still cling to it as one of the only good versions of Windows (I'm in the camp that there never were any good versions of Windows, just ones that were less garbage).
Ha, I'm probably a subscriber to the theory that there aren't any good versions of Windows and only some which are less (or more) bad than others. I'd probably put Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, and Windows 7 on the list of less bad versions of Windows. The UI started with Windows 95/NT 4.0 was/is very good and Windows (and many Linux desktop environments) are based on it, though the operating system itself on anything Windows 9x was extremely lousy.
ReplyDeleteI feel sorry for anyone still using Windows 7 on a regular basis as I'm sure the OS and some of the latest versions of software which run on it are pretty insecure these days. You never know though, I know there was a prominent retail Flickr uploader who swore off Flickr in the early-to-mid 2010s because Flickr no longer worked on browsers which worked on Windows 2000. That seemed like a strange reason to protest. Just switch to Linux already! But, hey, to each their own I suppose!
My computer at work has Windows 11 on the same hardware runs better with 11 than it did with 10. Hooray for that, at least that's a little bit of progress. Certainly I'm not going to switch to Windows at home though as I still like Linux way better! Besides that, anything past Windows 7 wouldn't even run on this desktop computer from 2006 even though it is running a current version of Linux Mint without any problems at all! My computer I'm using now is probably some years older than that Sears computer even!
I keep thinking about switching to Linux, but in my limited use of it so far, I always find it rather frustrating. Still, I'd much rather use Linux than Windows!
DeleteI know some people who are still using Windows 7. Seems like you can still use a lot of modern software with it, probably because it was still in common use in business systems until pretty recently. The security issue would be a big concern for me, though!
When my work updated from 10 to 11, a lot of the weird glitches I had been dealing with for years went away (some of the specialized software we use hated Windows 10 for some reason), but it did seem to make my computer run even slower. I'm always amazed at how poorly my work computer runs -- it's several years newer than my personal MacBook and cost several times as much, yet it's just so much slower. I'm sure some of that is Windows' fault and some of it is the security software that's always running (that's what the IT guys blame, at least).