Windows 7 End-of-Life (or at least Microsoft Support)

[Brian]

I'm one of those that waits until the last minute to perform a computer "upgrade", and have been running Win7pro on my main home computers. This month, Microsoft is ending support for Win7. When "WIN10" was new, Microsoft offered a free "upgrade". With some of the Win10 issues seen, I did not bother.

I did a google search on "upgrade WIN7 to WIN10" and came up with this article:

Can you still get a Windows 10 upgrade for free?

Microsoft's much-hyped free upgrade offer for Windows 10 ended years ago, but it took more than seven years before the company finally updated its activation servers. Here's what upgraders can expect now.

www.zdnet.com

Even though it is not advertised, Microsoft still updates WIN7 to WIN10. I just ran the upgrade on two machines running Win7Pro. Both worked flawlessly, my accounts, icons, programs- all working.

I used Macrium Reflect to do a "stand-alone-backup" of my main machine before running the upgrade, just in case.

SO- if you are running Win7, and want to keep using a supported OS- worth taking a look at.

 

[Brian]

So far this update has worked successfully on my I7 machine with 8GB, I3 machine with 8GB, and older I2 machine with 4GB. The latter 2 are Panasonic Toughbooks that I use for DOS, XP, WIN7, and now WIN10. The Toughbooks use an easily removable disk caddy, my favorite machines to use.

 

[Jock Elliott]

Thanks for the tip. I have a very old 2GB machine with a dead internal clock battery, dead battery pack (it stays alive only on the external power supply), not worth upgrading any hardware, that my brother-in-law and I will attempt to migrate to Linux.

BTW, I have a 10-year-old Dell workstation with 4 GB that I migrated to Win 10, and it works okay, but boots very slowly and opens applications slowly. Nevertheless, it still functions reasonably well.

Cheers, Jock

 

[Brian]

WIN10 seems to be more of a memory hog than WIN7. The I2 laptop with 4GByte RAM was too slow- seems 8GBytes really speeds things up.
I'm still playing with this.

 

[Brian]

I went to burn an ISO file to make a bootable CD for Macrium Reflect- a "stand-alone backup program". The free version allows you to make and restore full images of your disk, useful to have in this day and age- as it was 40 years ago.

ANYWAY! This was easy under WIN7, would not work under WIN10 for me. Looked online for instructions, some stated the ability to burn an ISO to disk was removed in WIN10, others made it sound easy- just like WIN7. THEN- one site warned that if another "APP" set itself for the ISO use use it as a default, the option that File Explorer offered would disappear.

"5KMedia" Player was the culprit. Used Task Manager to stop it from running, then the dedicated uninstaller removed it from the system. You have to delete it from running apps using task manager, or else the uninstaller will not work. They did not make it simple.

 

[Brian]

Fix Microsoft Compatibility Telemetry High CPU Usage (CompatTelRunner.exe)

Microsoft Compatibility Telemetry (CompatTelRunner.exe) often causes high CPU or disk usage. Learn how to disable/remove this process and speed up Windows.

geeksadvice.com

What is Runtime Broker, and why it is causing high CPU load? - gHacks Tech News

The following guide helps you analyze the Runtime Broker process in Windows, and find out why it is causing high CPU, memory or disk use.

www.ghacks.net

I noticed dramatic slowdowns on my machines after "upgrading" to Windows 10. Gives a new dimension to the term WinDOZE. More bloatware stealing CPU cycles and the reason I write my embedded software to run under PharLap extended DOS.

Running Task Manager showed some culprits, google searched on them to find out what they were, if they were necessary, and how to disable them. The above links helped solve a lot of issues.

It's hard to imagine what Microsoft will do next. Maybe Intel and AMD give them kickbacks to load up the computers with more crap just to sell faster CPU's.