Windows Vista support ends April 11

[Numanoid]

Wanted to update Windows Vista today.

I started the update at about 16:30, now at 22:00 it has almost finished updating

It was stuck for several hours checking for updates, I almost gave up waiting but after 4 hours it actually provided the updates

[Debutante]

But when surfing, checking email, internet banking, youtube, WinXP aint no good anymore.

Why not?

I can second that "not good" idea. And not for possible security issues. The ONLY reason I upgraded last year from XP was because being online became a shite. Webpages would'nt load correctly from using old IE, and even changing to Chrome - being online was completely untenable.

It worked fine for all offline things, and I was never infected, but I just couldn't handle it anymore. Youtube was a big problem for me too, hotmail and other sites I used regularly just wouldn't load - there'd be a title bar and nothing else alot of the time. Hang times during surfing as well... can't remember what else but it was a shame. I got 8.1 and haven't looked back.

[Numanoid]

It was a sad day back in early 2014 when I upgraded one of my main machines from XP to Win 7

But I haven't looked back either.

I have XP installed on a desktop in just incase, but it stays in storage...

[Zombie Queen]

The ONLY reason I upgraded last year from XP was because being online became a shite. Webpages would'nt load correctly from using old IE, and even changing to Chrome - being online was completely untenable.

Yeah, using IE was never a good idea. Chrome doesn't work on XP anymore, I think. Frankly, being online became shite on any system. I'm using Firefox + Noscript to shield from flying daggers adds. I'm now switching XP to 7 and back frequently, as I have some stuff that works only here and some stuff that works only there, and I can see no difference in how FF works. Cool thing about FF is that I can log to the same profile, so I have consistent history and bookmarks on both systems.

[JCJR]

I wasn't keeping notes in my calendar, but sometime in the last couple or three years, MS rolled out auto updates that made IE practically nonfunctional on my win 7 machines. I think it had correlation to the IE upates when win 8 was released. I had an XP still running on a mac virtual machine, and think the update bricked IE on that XP as well, but could be recalling wrong.

The Win 7 IE screw-up seemed related to MS adding both 32 and 64 bit versions of IE on the same machine, and sometimes the 32 bit version would want to run and sometimes the 64 bit version.

I used chrome some off'n'on, especially on android, but am one of those paranoid nutcases who suspect that google has got too big and powerful, and I try not to use google software, though android seems more tolerable to me than iOS. Am also not an apple fan. An ex-apple fanboy. In the 1980's into the late 1990's thought Apple hung the moon, but they just made me mad too many times and I wrote them off. Not trying to start a platform war, just expressing personal pref, personal reason not to use safari ferinstance.

For a few years used firefox on mac, pc and android. It is good.

When online-updating a couple of machines to Win10, the auto-update was failing because it said my IE was not fully updated, and my IE had been so bricked by the MS updates from a couple years earlier, the latest IE update always failed. So I finally downloaded the "manual" MS win10 updater. My old version of IE did not properly display the MS update page, did not show the link to the downloadable win10 updater, so I had to go to the MS site using firefox in order to be able to see/download the MS updater! Nutty.

The last few months have been using MS Edge browser on Win10, or the amazon Silk browser on a kindle fire franken-android tablet (which seems about the only browser that will run on the amazon bastardization of android os). Both work quite satisfactorily for my day-to-day purposes.

If a computer is hardware-capable of running win10, I'd want to run win10 on it rather than win 7 or vista or xp. One "real slow" pc I upgraded from win 7 to win 10, the win 10 did not turn the slow computer into a speed demon but it seemed to run a "little faster" than win 7 on the same hardware.

I had few complaints with Win 7 so far as that goes. Didn't hate Vista as bad as some folks did, seemed to work fine for me. Actually Win 95, 98, ME, XP didn't bug me so bad. They all got the job done good enough, but for today Win 10 seems purt good.

[xNiMiNx]

I will gladly adopt any orphaned (Legit) Vista (non-OEM) product keys and take good care of them.

I mean it, dig up that dvd case, send me a PM, ill give it a good home.

[Numanoid]

Vista got less than 100 days on life support

[pekbro]

I recently got a cheap but decent laptop, (core I3) for free and have
been giving windows 10 a serious go.

Its annoying, but not so bad. Most of the annoyances can be disabled,
leaving you with an OS not overly different from Win 7 or 8.

Unless you have some specific reason to keep using Vista and plan
to keep the machine offline, keeping it will only create more and more
headaches for you.

I finally got all my clients off Xp and Vista, and they are all much
happier for it.

Everyone should move up to win 7 at least, you can still buy a copy pretty cheap.

-Cheers

[chk071]

I recently got a cheap but decent laptop, (core I3) for free and have
been giving windows 10 a serious go.

Its annoying, but not so bad. Most of the annoyances can be disabled,
leaving you with an OS not overly different from Win 7 or 8.

Definitely. IMO, most of the annoyances are rather on the base of "give the people something cheerful to play around with", like Cortana. I really have no use at all for that. Apart from that, it is much better than Windows 8, because Windows 8 was quite a failure regarding the orientation on mobile devices, while Windows 10 gives a nice experience on both mobile, and desktop devices. It's performing better here than Windows 7 too, what more could i ask for...

[Numanoid]

Everyone should move up to win 7 at least, you can still buy a copy pretty cheap.

Agreed, but then again there is "just" three years left of support for Win 7. Extended support ends Jan 14, 2020.

So sooner or later a user need to think about upgrading even beyond that.

[Zombie Queen]

Or not. I still boot back to XP to do 2D graphic work or record audio. Definitely smoother than 7, at least I can browse files, without having to wait extra 30 seconds for explorer to scan the files...

[camsr]

Or not. I still boot back to XP to do 2D graphic work or record audio. Definitely smoother than 7, at least I can browse files, without having to wait extra 30 seconds for explorer to scan the files...

You should disable file indexing if it's causing slowdowns.

[ZeePok]

I recently got a cheap but decent laptop, (core I3) for free and have
been giving windows 10 a serious go.

Its annoying, but not so bad. Most of the annoyances can be disabled,
leaving you with an OS not overly different from Win 7 or 8.

Definitely. IMO, most of the annoyances are rather on the base of "give the people something cheerful to play around with", like Cortana. I really have no use at all for that. Apart from that, it is much better than Windows 8, because Windows 8 was quite a failure regarding the orientation on mobile devices, while Windows 10 gives a nice experience on both mobile, and desktop devices. It's performing better here than Windows 7 too, what more could i ask for...

 
I would never go over to Win10 if I can help it. It's the most terrible 'snooping' OS in existence. And the user doesn't have control over updates too.

Read all about that here and here

It's M$'s ploy to totally subject their users.

When Win7 dies it's Linux time ...

[Zombie Queen]

You should disable file indexing if it's causing slowdowns.

I did. Disabled file indexing, windows search, set all folders to "general items" or what is it called, only helps a little on a folder with couple hundred images, there's still a painful lag.

[camsr]

Try disabling thumbnail preview then, forgot how but it's possible.