HACKER Q&A
📣 butz

Why are you still using Windows 7?


One year after official support of Windows 7 has ended, it still has quite big user base with 18% of total Windows OS users worldwide. Question to home users: what is keeping you from upgrading to Windows 10 or migrating to other operating systems?


  👤 iujjkfjdkkdkf Accepted Answer ✓
I have a dual boot machine with windows 7 on it. I boot into windows about once a year to try something or another.

The machine is from 2013 and was pretty good back then, Latitude laptop with a Core i5 and 8GB ram. I still use it regularly as a personal linux laptop.

Getting to my point, this laptop is still good enough for normal use 8 years after I got it, and even if i was a daily windows users, what reason would i have to try and install windows 10? So it doesnt surprise me that many just keep the version their computer came with, and have kept their computers since windows 7 days.

Also, having just had to try windows 10, it really is a bad user experience compared to linux, mac, or windows 7, if nothing else because of added novelty for no reason. The only compelling thing about it for me is WSL, which I would definitely appreciate having on the same machine if I had a MS office heavy workflow.


👤 LargoLasskhyfv
It just works.

I'm too lazy to deal with all the crap W10 in whichever incarnation brings.

It is very customised and locked down to basics, thus very minimal in resource usage, both memory and storage.

And it's not my main platform. I can dual-boot it natively, or the same install in a VM as needed.

I need to use some crappy applications which perform better under it, than on some Linux.

I don't like to have my strings pulled, and so on...

So...shrug?

Oh, yes, almost forgotten: It looks like Windows2000!1!! ;->


👤 YaBa
I'll never install Windows 10, went from dual boot (Win7+Linux) to full Linux system + VirtualBox with Win7 because some of my work softwares won't play along with Wine. I don't think to change in the nearest future, everytime I open a tech site, it always has news about bugs and problems with the "new" update. Use your time with useful things, not solving around stupid bugs, installing and uninstalling stuff just because Microsoft doesn't care about their customers being betatesters.

👤 simonblack
Easy. It was the best Windows. "Peak Windows". It's all been downhill since Windows 7.

👤 the_only_law
I have a single machine running Windows 7. It’s an old toughbook I bought so that I have a portable machine that still features I need for certain project. I haven’t moved it to Linux or a BSD because I’m mildly worried about hardware support for certain things, and I have a number of external devices I connect to it without *nix support. I haven’t upgraded to Win10 mostly because of memory concerns. I got it really cheap, mostly because it was rather old. It only has 4GB of RAM and I’ve had poor experiences running Win10 on older or memory constrained devices.

👤 quickthrower2
I got and old cheap laptop for general Netflix watching or whatever. Has win 7 and just works.

👤 pks016
I have it on my old laptop(i3, 6gb ram). Windows 10 doesn't work great. I use it once in a while, mainly for backup.

👤 focom
I believe you won't find anybody on HN still running Win7 on a personal machine.

👤 type0
Drivers

👤 tubularhells
My parents didn't want to make the jump to ubuntu, even though I would have supported them all the way, remotely even. I don't use win10 myself, and I'm not supporting it for their sake either. So I left them on win7 and cut the support myself. They are on their own.