ISSUE : Downgrading Windows 8.1 to Windows 7

[ReaperAA]

11 hours ago, Frost-Core said:

I have some touchpad issues i can not get over with, and the broken metro ui they have. it just sucks

 

Just use something like Classic Shell for that. With that, you will have have Win7 like start menu in Win8/8.1.

 

Although Win7 was my all-time favorite OS, I would not recommend to go with it at all due to modern software no longer supporting it and also due to the risk of malware. Since even windows 8 is going EOL soon, I would either recommend to move to Windows 10 or using a Linux distro.

[Graf Zahl]

9 hours ago, AlexMax said:

I'm not going to say you're wrong, but what I am going to say is that I feel some folks care way too much about way too nitpicks.  In my time, I've used early XP, Vista, 8, 8.1 and early 10.  Every single time, after a period of adjustment, I realized people saying the new version of Windows sucked were wrong, wrong, wrong, and frankly I'm at the point where people sticking to old versions of Windows feel like some grampa on his porch yelling about what life was life back in his day.  Yep, even Windows 8 was good - I actually think the Windows Desktop never looked better than it did in 8.1, and at least the start menu tiles made sense...as opposed to being crudely grafted onto the 10 start menu.

 

I tend to disagree. Microsoft managed the unthinkable with 11 and made a desktop that's actually worse than 8. That redesigned taskbar is an abomination and the start menu easily the worst of the entire bunch. Fortunately with third party add-ons it can virtually all be fixed.

 

 

9 hours ago, AlexMax said:

It's just a question of when you're going to rip the band-aid off.  7 might work okay for you now, but the more time passes the more programs and drivers will stop supporting 7, period.  Not because they make the decision to, but because popular tooling will soon assume a target runs Windows 8 or even 10.  The only reason I'm not on 11 is for work reasons, but that tooling I need will get updated.

 

Personally I think it's just idiotic to stick to a 10+ year old OS just because the desktop looks nicer. That's forfeiting 10 years of progress on the internals plus decreasing driver support for everything. Just like it happened with XP, support for 7 will eventually fall off the rails entirely once there's some newfangled things of more recent versions that an app Must Have (TM).

[Gibbon]

It 100% is just stupid beyond belief.  That’s like someone using OSX Tiger or Ubuntu 8.10 just because “I like Tigers look” or “Gnome2 was leet”.

 

Stay with an old fuddy duddy OS, but don’t expect source port devs to support it.  We get enough “wah wah it doesn’t work on XP or Vista” crap as it is.

[HavoX]

5 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

I tend to disagree. Microsoft managed the unthinkable with 11 and made a desktop that's actually worse than 8. That redesigned taskbar is an abomination and the start menu easily the worst of the entire bunch.

I concur. Open-Shell-Menu can't even do shit (unless you use ExplorerPatcher). That's the reason I've been holding off on Win11 in the first place.

[ChopBlock223]

On 4/16/2022 at 8:13 PM, Graf Zahl said:

Then use Linux, but not an old OS version that may become a floodgate for bad stuff.

You may not believe this, but there's people out there who are just at the lookout for security hole reports and then check if Windows 7 is susceptible to the reported issues. And if they are successful, you'll be screwed.

I'm not going back to 7 because of those exact reasons, more than anything I'm lamenting that 10 isn't as good as 7 when it comes to being user friendly or configurable, and a complete disrespect by Microsoft towards my autonomy as a computer user and my privacy respectively.

I can configure 10 to be closer to 7, and thus better, but not by enough.

 

On 4/16/2022 at 8:56 PM, gwain said:

boy do I have a penguin for you pal!

Over my dead body.

 

On 4/16/2022 at 8:56 PM, gwain said:

I think you should check out linux mint or pop os I think you might me overestimating how useful and how much compatibility windows7 has compared to the newer windows they've planned windows7's death to sale more versions of newer windows so alot of applications just wont work right on windows7 

For the sake of argument, I do my image editing with Photoshop CS6, I'm not exactly going out of my way for the latest builds of AutoCAD

 

[Gibbon]

2 hours ago, ChopBlock223 said:

I'm not going back to 7 because of those exact reasons, more than anything I'm lamenting that 10 isn't as good as 7 when it comes to being user friendly or configurable, and a complete disrespect by Microsoft towards my autonomy as a computer user and my privacy respectively.

I can configure 10 to be closer to 7, and thus better, but not by enough.

 

Privacy and Microsoft in the same sentence don’t mesh well.  If you really want privacy, go with a FOSS distro of GNU/Linux-Libre and use a VPN.

 

 

Edited April 18, 2022 by Gibbon

[gwain]

12 hours ago, ChopBlock223 said:

I do my image editing with Photoshop CS6

hmmmm......

you could bring over the executable and run it w/ wine and if not for some bizarre proprietary reason: owo

side note:

Spoiler

 

there are a couple of assholes calling you an idiot and whatnot ignore them man be you :}

they can be exterminated like you would any termite or roach

 

 

Edited April 18, 2022 by gwain

[Serum]

On 4/16/2022 at 3:26 PM, Frost-Core said:

drivers, gpu n stuff kinda dont exist inside of linux (my world is sad) 

 

Nvidia gpu? Nvidia drivers have been pretty solid & easy to set up on Linux for me

[AndrewB]

13 hours ago, ChopBlock223 said:

Over my dead body.

 

 

 

Linux is a complete no-go for anyone whose time is even remotely valuable. When one very common program or service fails to install, be prepared to spend dozens of hours on a goose hunt searching through utterly cryptic troubleshooting for a problem with no certainty of a solution at all.

 

If you're so paranoid about "staying up to date" on your OS, then there's nothing preventing you from keeping all your hacker-sensitive stuff and latest and greatest hardware on a Windows 10 install for your games, while using a different machine with an older OS for all your other day-to-day stuff.

Edited April 18, 2022 by AndrewB

[Frost-Core]

1 hour ago, Serum said:

 

Nvidia gpu? Nvidia drivers have been pretty solid & easy to set up on Linux for me

This is a rabbit hole, Graf Zahl Even says these are nuclear waste

There are people out there on doom world that use Win7 today and have no problems whatsoever, you can guess one or two.

Edited April 18, 2022 by Frost-Core

[gwain]

 

1 hour ago, AndrewB said:

Linux is a complete no-go for anyone whose time is even remotely valuable. When one very common program or service fails to install, be prepared to spend dozens of hours on a goose hunt searching through utterly cryptic troubleshooting for a problem with no certainty of a solution at all.

 

If you're so paranoid about "staying up to date" on your OS, then there's nothing preventing you from keeping all your hacker-sensitive stuff and latest and greatest hardware on a Windows 10 install for your games, while using a different machine with an older OS for all your other day-to-day stuff.

I think your misunderstanding linux its a different operating system that operates differently than other stuff like windows or mac its balance is user centered over user friendly that makes distros like ubuntu (or others you may have tried and are talking about) kinda weird because they've made presets where you should have made your own stuff (im about to compare it to guitars) if you hand a new musician who can play a scale or two and knows a few songs a guitar customized for a metal head who has a custom headless guitar with an angled than the new musician is going to not like it very much

 

also using two computers is covoluted and ive never had a problem with installing things on linux your either regurgitating that or you tried running an exe 

Edited April 18, 2022 by gwain

[Graf Zahl]

49 minutes ago, Frost-Core said:

This is a rabbit hole, Graf Zahl Even says these are nuclear waste

 

 

I never said that. What I said was that Intel's Windows drivers for older hardware are nuclear waste. So you got both the OS and the manufacturer wrong. :P

 

 

Edited April 18, 2022 by Graf Zahl

[Frost-Core]

18 minutes ago, Graf Zahl said:

 

I never said that. What I said was that Intel's Windows drivers for older hardware are nuclear waste. So you got both the OS and the manufacturer wrong. :P

 

 

No joke, the windows driver is very slow and very buggy, even though it has "OpenGL ES" Support, you won't even get a very good experience with it, also intel did not develop these windows drivers, and they just left them, no xp/vista support, so react os wont work.

[Azuris]

On 4/16/2022 at 6:40 PM, CoolerDoomeR said:

Many people in the 7 billion population of the world still use Windows XP or Windows 98 and work with the Internet every day, and so far few people have been involved in hacking attacks and ....

 

On 4/16/2022 at 6:50 PM, Graf Zahl said:

Windows 98 might be safe because it is so old and user base is so small that it's not worth targeting. XP and even more 7 are a different story.

 

 

Nah, can't believe it :P

 

Even back then it was crazy how fast your XP system was getting infected with a fresh install if you had any service pack.

Dos based 98 should be worse, as its user management is widely open.

 

Windows 7 is sailing well, because Microsoft restriced the user accounts with Vista (if you didn't actually use a admin account for your everyday purpose).

But if the ship gets a hole, nobody will close it.

 

[Blzut3]

22 minutes ago, Azuris said:

Even back then it was crazy how fast your XP system was getting infected with a fresh install if you had any service pack.

Dos based 98 should be worse, as its user management is widely open.

I don't think it's that simple.  Yes, Windows 9x has a far looser security model, but it's attack surface is a lot smaller since it lacks a lot of creature comfort services that NT based Windows had.  Additionally one major change that has happened since the days of Windows 2000/XP (pre-SP2 overhaul) being rampantly infected is people went from directly connecting their machine to the Internet to having a gateway device (router) with a closed by default firewall.  (I mention XP SP2 since that's when Windows introduced its built in firewall among other things.)  In either case I don't expect that anyone will get infected just by virtue of having an Internet connection available, which was a thing back in the days you're referring to.

 

Daily driving Windows 9x is getting pretty close to a futile experience too, which isn't quite the case for XP yet.  I believe at this point you have to run a proxy to get rid of HTTPS, and even then Windows 9x is limited to old browser engines which probably won't run half the modern web.  I can't really imagine a malware developer going through the effort to use retro computing tool chains to build Windows 9x compatible malware when I have to believe that pretty close to 100% of the users of Windows 9x aren't even going to have a chance of stumbling across it.

 

Although now that I think about it, with hardware vendors pruning old drivers from their websites, one could probably fairly easily get an army of 486 and Pentium 3 machines by putting out infected drivers.  The number of times the last surviving copy of a driver for some hardware is some random FTP server occurs far more than it should.

[Murdoch]

4 hours ago, gwain said:

also using two computers is covoluted and ive never had a problem with installing things on linux your either regurgitating that or you tried running an exe 

 

I tried to do a Linux build for a customer earlier this year and it was an exercise in pain. Both Ubuntu and Mint straight up refused to install to the M.2. In frustration I resorted to a SATA SSD and it worked. I also installed Mint to an ASUS laptop. It worked fine - except it if you tried to boot the computer off the power, when the OS failed to load. A kernel update fixed that issue thankfully.

 

You may have good experience, which is fine, but it is by no means representative of the sum total experience of everyone. Sorry but when you OS cannot cleanly install on a modern desktop build running basic hardware from the most respected and well-known manufacturers on the planet, your OS is clearly not prime time ready and definitely not suitable for Joe Average User. It just isn't. For all it's many sins, Windows generally "Just Works (tm)" more than it doesn't. And I have done literally dozens of builds for customers over the years (not to mention hundreds of HD replacements on all kinds of hardware old and new) so believe me, I would know.

Edited April 18, 2022 by Murdoch

[Murdoch]

On 4/17/2022 at 6:03 AM, Frost-Core said:

I have some touchpad issues i can not get over with, and the broken metro ui they have. it just sucks

 

Ah... why not just get a wireless mouse?

 

As for metro, as others have pointed out, get Classic Shell.

[gwain]

47 minutes ago, Murdoch said:

your OS is clearly not prime time ready and definitely not suitable for Joe Average User.

read the blurb above what you responded two :)

 

also it kinda sounds like your kinda mad its always okay to step away from the computer bro you'll feel better rember its all blips and bloops were sending eachother :}

Edited April 19, 2022 by gwain

[Murdoch]

13 minutes ago, gwain said:

read the blurb above what you responded two :)

 

also it kinda sounds like your kinda mad its always okay to step away from the computer bro you'll feel better rember its all blips and bloops were sending eachother :}

 

Not mad in the slightest. Simply stating my point.

[Nights]

On 4/16/2022 at 4:53 AM, Frost-Core said:

Hello! i have been having issues that nag me every time i use windows 8.1, so i thought of downgrading, but then i would lose my files n stuff, so how do i downgrade safely?

I would say just use Windows 10 with a 7 skin and call it a day, but I know that's not enough for some people. If the Windows 7 experience is really what you want, then just use a VM. Sure it's not a go to for gaming, but at least you can use it safely use it without fear of security issues. 

Unless you get malware that penetrates through your VM

[spineapple tea]

How is this thread two pages long?

[Master O]

19 minutes ago, Spineapple tea said:

How is this thread two pages long?

 

People posted enough for two pages of posts?  [/sarcasm]

Edited April 19, 2022 by Master O

[LexiMax]

I mean we can all say it's for security, but me personally I think so called "power users" just hyperfocus on small inconveniences in their workflows.  If they simply force themselves to learn and accumulate to the new normal, they'll find out that the new version isn't THAT different, plus has a whole other bag of goodies that they didn't even realize was there.

 

Also it's worth mentioning that most desktop Linux distros are either rolling release or have a very fast release cadence of once or twice a year.  And there are STILL people to this day complaining about how much of a step down GNOME 3 was compared to GNOME 2 (just like they did GNOME 2 vs 1, or KDE 4 vs 3, or systemd vs whatever).  So if you don't want your interface to get yanked out from under you unexpectedly, Linux is not for you.

Edited April 19, 2022 by AlexMax

[Edward850]

1 hour ago, AlexMax said:

I mean we can all say it's for security, but me personally I think so called "power users" just hyperfocus on small inconveniences in their workflows.  If they simply force themselves to learn and accumulate to the new normal, they'll find out that the new version isn't THAT different, plus has a whole other bag of goodies that they didn't even realize was there.

Quite so. Frankly I'm not sure I grasp what this supposed problem is with the Windows 11 taskbar, it all seems quite straight forward and functional? And if your problem is icons being in the centre (which is the only thing I've seen people actually bring up) then you can just move them to the left, it's literally an option.

Meanwhile WSL2 GPU support in Win11 is hype as fuck.

[Kinsie]

1 hour ago, Edward850 said:

Quite so. Frankly I'm not sure I grasp what this supposed problem is with the Windows 11 taskbar, it all seems quite straight forward and functional? And if your problem is icons being in the centre (which is the only thing I've seen people actually bring up) then you can just move them to the left, it's literally an option.

My problem with Windows 11 is primarily with the Start Menu sucking ass. I've spent a non-zero amount of time molding my Start Menu into a nice easy app launcher with nice custom icons for most stuff...

 

so the less-organizable, less-customizable, just-kinda-downright-ugly new version fills me with The Anger by comparison.

[Graf Zahl]

1 hour ago, Edward850 said:

Quite so. Frankly I'm not sure I grasp what this supposed problem is with the Windows 11 taskbar, it all seems quite straight forward and functional? And if your problem is icons being in the centre (which is the only thing I've seen people actually bring up) then you can just move them to the left, it's literally an option.

Meanwhile WSL2 GPU support in Win11 is hype as fuck.

 

The main problem with it is that it stripped a lot of useful functionality from the old one. The two biggest issues:

 

No more drag & drop of files onto the icons to open the file with the selected app.

Forced grouping of multiple instances of the same app into the same icon with a very clunky selection interface for the multiple instances.

 

These actually severely slowed down my workflow, especially the grouping issue.

 

As for the start menu, to this day I stick to the only one that was good, i.e. the original Windows 95 version. When this got removed in Windows 7 I installed an alternative and have been doing ever since. Windows 11 was the first one where I also had to install a taskbar replacement to get the lost functionality back.

 

And it is very clear that the sole motivation here was to "become more like Apple", as the crippled taskbar's issues were all slavishly copied from macOS's dock (which, btw, still sucks an order of magnitude more than Windows 11s new task bar.)

 

 

 

[Murdoch]

59 minutes ago, Graf Zahl said:

And it is very clear that the sole motivation here was to "become more like Apple", as the crippled taskbar's issues were all slavishly copied from macOS's dock (which, btw, still sucks an order of magnitude more than Windows 11s new task bar.)

 

I agree. Also copying Apple is so idiotic i can barely comprehend it. Apple are so ragingly obsessed with simplicity they actually make things complicated again by obscuring important things. Like why does bring up the wifi network list in windows 11 now take two clicks? Why do many critical context menu items in explorer now get shunted to a second menu when the inexperienced users probably dont even know the context menu even exists?

[Gez]

100% of Microsoft guys are actually full on with the Winblow$ hate, which is why they're trying to destroy everything good that Windows ever had and replace it with the worst bits from Apple and Android.

 

 

And yeah, if it weren't for the security, maintenance and forward compatibility issues, I'd advise people to stick with Win 7, the last good version of Windows. Everything since has been worse and worse; with a UI focused on diminishing productivity and ever-more invasive spyware. If only Linux had a less clusterfucky landscape... Or there was some serious desktop competitor that wasn't even worse than MS.

[Graf Zahl]

29 minutes ago, Murdoch said:

 

Why do many critical context menu items in explorer now get shunted to a second menu when the inexperienced users probably dont even know the context menu even exists?

 

The technical reason is that Microsoft added yet another way to make a menu that's incompatible with the old one.

The real question should be why they never stick to the tried and true, but constantly have to reinvent the wheel and causing interoperability issues with older software.

[Jaccident]

On 4/16/2022 at 5:40 PM, CoolerDoomeR said:

so far few people have been involved in hacking attacks and ....

Tell that to the NHS lmfao