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Author Topic: To Update Win7 or Not To Update -- That Is The Question  (Read 553 times)

Awesome Donkey

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To Update Win7 or Not To Update -- That Is The Question
« on: March 18, 2022, 04:46:39 pm »

It doesn't seem significantly slower on my 9 year old Acer Aspire S3 netbook than windows 7 was.

Fun fact that not many know, but Windows 10 should actually generally perform better on the same hardware when direct comparing to Windows 7 and Windows 8.1. This is because Microsoft had to do various optimizations to get the Windows kernel (and Windows itself) running as the OS on the Xbox. There may be factors (e.g. some of the "bloat" that Windows 10 added) that may slow the system down in other ways, but generally on the low level it should perform better.

It's just Windows 10 gets a lot of negative press about the telemetry stuff (even though Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 has it as well). You can turn most of it off in Windows 10, but not all of it unfortunately.

P.S. I'm well aware of the Extended Security Updates program that Microsoft has that enterprise customers can pay for Windows 7 updates for an additional three years. There's now less than a year left before that ends too. It's meant to be used to give companies in the enterprise space the time they need to make the transition from Windows 7 to Windows 10. It's not meant to be used by individual users in order to gain three more years of security updates.
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bob

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Re: To Update Win7 or Not To Update
« Reply #1 on: March 18, 2022, 04:56:26 pm »

...
It's just Windows 10 gets a lot of negative press about the telemetry stuff (even though Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 has it as well). You can turn most of it off in Windows 10, but not all of it unfortunately.
You have a link for a guide on turning off as much of that as possible?
I've done the no account install and turned off as much as possible when going through the install but I'm sure there's more.
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Awesome Donkey

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Re: To Update Win7 or Not To Update -- That Is The Question
« Reply #2 on: March 18, 2022, 05:02:49 pm »

How I do it is I manually go through Windows' settings app and change the settings that are scattered throughout. You can also use an app to do this, O&O's ShutUp10 app is probably the best (and most importantly, safest) tool out there for this, as it'll properly disable things and it tells the user if it's safe or not to disable something. I don't directly use the ShutUp10 app for the majority of my tweaking, but once I go through Windows' settings app and disable certain things, once running ShutUp10 it picks up on the features I disabled in Windows' settings.

The only tweaks I use ShutUp10 for (for time saving reasons, I could do it manually through the registry/group policy too) is the settings to disable Windows Update from automatically downloading and updating drivers and the setting to disable the Microsoft Store from automatically installing "recommended" apps like Candy Crush.

In my experience doing mild tweaking and fixing others' PCs who ran apps and tweaked the heck out the OS, it's best to avoid things like running PowerShell scripts to mass remove all modern apps from Windows 10 or 11 as it actually semi-breaks the OS doing this. If you go too far it's so easy to break Windows and cause it to act weirdly.
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JimH

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Re: To Update Win7 or Not To Update -- That Is The Question
« Reply #3 on: March 18, 2022, 06:26:11 pm »

How can you live without Candy Crush?
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Gl3nn

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Re: To Update Win7 or Not To Update -- That Is The Question
« Reply #4 on: March 18, 2022, 06:50:45 pm »


The only tweaks I use ShutUp10 for (for time saving reasons, I could do it manually through the registry/group policy too) is the settings to disable Windows Update from automatically downloading and updating drivers and the setting to disable the Microsoft Store from automatically installing "recommended" apps like Candy Crush.


I've used the Group Policy Editor in W10pro (and Win11pro) for a long time now to 'notify for download' all Windows updates. That allows you to see what's queued-up and download/install what you want, when it suits you.  You can also download the Windows troubleshooter (wushowhide.diagcab) from MSFT and actually hide updates you don't wish to install.  It's been really good to prevent those unwanted driver updates.
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