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Moving from Windows 7 to windows 10 - testing 1-2-3
sorveltaja:
One thing that I like about W7, is that it has a lot more options to tweak themes and colors, than W10 does. I have always used greyish 'Classic' theme, as it's easier to my eyes.
Besides, I just love that stone age Windows NT look. No bells or whistles.
In W10, options that are available just suck. About the only way to adjust at least some colors - without third party software - seems to be to edit rgb values in either high-contrast white, or -dark .theme file. In other theme files such entries don't seem to exist.
Downside of using high contrast theme is, that it forces programs like Waterfox (that I use as it allows legacy add-ons like Blank Your Monitor) to show pages in screaming white and black.
There are other options like this: https://github.com/malvinas2/ClassicThemeForWindows10
Meh, I tried that, but it has way too much other stuff involved than just colors. And there is always possibility to break something in W10, when such tools are used.
To me it looks like a waste of time, if(and when) it needs to be broken and "cleaned" to be usable and free from that telemetry stuff.
So, for home users, what improvements W10 has over W7? Any thoughts are welcome.
bob h.:
Reading this thread makes me happy I switched 100% to Linux in 2008!
Bob
AdeV:
Like Bob - I switched to Linux on my daily driver some years ago (not sure I was brave enough to do it in 2008... but certainly by 2015); except being a VB/C# programmer, I did need to keep a Windows machine around. Nowadays the only use I have for Windows is CAD - and I believe there's a pretty good web based CAD available now which might finally mean I can toss all of those Windows VMs out of the window for once and for all...
sorveltaja - in my humble opinion, you should try to keep Windows 7 working for as long as possible... I can't see any benefit to upgrading to Windows 10 - unless you literally need a piece of software that absolutely won't work in Windows 7. Windows 10 (and 11, I believe, although I haven't experienced that one, fortunately) are chock full of unnecessary crap, they call home all the time, and who wants to boot their computer up only to be confronted with 1/2 hour wait while Windows does "stuff" to itself?
If you've got enough CPU & memory for it... run Windows X in a VM (Oracle Virtualbox is my current weapon of choice, although I've happily used VMWare Player before as well). I have a VM running Windows 7 with Solidworks, and as long as I give it 4 CPU cores and 16GB of RAM, it seems to go at least as fast as I can drive it... maybe a pro would notice some lag?. I also have a Windows 10 VM (my old Solidworks setup, before I got fed up with Win10 & downgraded); I accidentally fired it up yesterday & wow! 20 minutes of "updating" at start-up; then when I went to shut it down, it wanted another goodness knows how long to update itself again. I broke the rules: I turned it off :lol: And then deleted it...
BTW, in an earlier message, you noted that "For example Oracle VM seems to have a limit of 128Mb Ram for video card. For simple tasks, that may well be enough." - If you enable 3D Acceleration, then 128Mb becomes the minimum(!) and it'll go out to 512Mb (IIRC - I'll check in a few minutes, when my correct VM has copied to my new computer).
As I said - I use Solidworks in a Virtualbox VM. I actually haven't tried it on the machine I just bought & am setting up now; but on my laptop (which, admittedly, has a 12th Gen 12-core i7 CPU in it and 32GB RAM) it honestly works brilliantly. My new PC is a 7th gen i7 (7770), also 32GB & 1TB SSD - a 5 year old refurbished Dell Optiplex 7050, for slightly less than £400. So far, it's great, but the Grand Solidworks Test will start in about 20 mins, when it's finished copying the VM from the laptop :)
sorveltaja:
W10 is indeed famous... of being infamous. I've read about users who wonder why their laptops/PC's struggle, when there are almost 200 processes running. It's like decoy; "click this, and you get some really jolly good things installed. But we don't tell you how much all that crap taxes your computer".
Rather economical and ecological way to do things, eh? I just can't see anything changing for better, be it W11, W12, or whatever.
Meh, I just had to rant again. Sorry about that.
But to get to the point, yeah, I pretty much keep using W7 as long as possible.
Brave browser is about the only software I use, that nags about needing to update to W10 before next browser update. So far, for some reason Brave hasn't forced to update itself.
I use it only to watch Youtube videos, as it blocks all bloody annoying ads. In other words - Youtube like it used to be.
awemawson:
I still use Win7 on my main desktop and my workshop PC as I have programs I need that Win10 can’t cope with .
However I also still use Internet Explorer in Win 7 as my default browser as my IP camera network will only run on I E.
This is beginning to cause problems with web sites that can’t handle I E. I got stuck in a black hole the other day having successfully selected an item, put it in my basket, but the site couldn’t progress to payment. I ended up having to log on from a different computer using Firefox to complete the transaction
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