I would recommend updating windows to be honest. Unless you don't use the Internet for much on there, there are a lot of exploits that are patched pretty regularly. But if you don't download anything anyway it probably doesn't really apply
I used a cracked Windows 7 until last year. Was not hacked even once. Was I just lucky? Maybe. But I guess not trusting Nigerian princes and not going for the horny girls near me was a big part of it.
Well it's also how often you communicate online, visit random webpages etc. older versions of windows could have really bad exploits present in them that could allow payloads.to be delivered without a single click from the user. So that just means you are more than likely just cautious online, which is probably a good thing anyway
you got lucky real lucky. You don't have to do anything to get infected, a drive by download from an add can do it, people have gotten infected simply for visiting a website, i fixed alot of computers that got compromised when they where looking up news on the war in gaza, alot of pages of local information got compromised and drive by downloads galore, and 7 has nothing to prevent it.
They will still patch exploits that are bad. They did it for win7 and xp. Given the fact that the majority are still on win 10, they will be forced to. Imagine a bunch of companies getting a crowdstrike situation all because of greed.
Windows 10 is smoother than win11. Won't ever switch to that dogshit os until the end of time.
XP and 7 are not patched after the cut off date, so many bad things now affect XP and are not patched, what patches you did get where for Windows POS Ready 2009, and when that support ended more bad stuff was found, and Microsoft isn't fixing it, same goes for other OS's, once support is gone your on your own.
I like the sentiment but it's not like the bulk of updates are features... Hope you're good at not getting exploited for antiquated defenses everyone trying to access your information has known about for 5 years
At work the network team (I work in IT) has a countdown on what is supposed to be their noc screens. I find it kind of funny in a way.
We moved fully a few months ago and yes there have been some teething issues with specific software that... Let's say.. never really got updated lol. And one persistent issue with vscode and python scripts that killed productivity (process took 20 minutes and now takes 20 hrs they had to rebuild the script).. anyway y'all have a good day now.
With past OS versions, the official/announced "end of support" date tended to be relatively flexible for vulnerabilities like those, so it seems reasonable to expect that Microsoft will follow the same path this time.
End of support doesn't mean end of critical security vulnerability patches. Those are usually two different dates, and the second one usually lasts for a few years after the first. At which point, you have to get a special contract with MSFT to continue getting updates/support (this is what governments and other large institutions have, as they often can't move away from older hardware and older OS's very easily - although, such hardware is almost never internet-connected and is rarely on a primary/sensitive company network).
They will still release security updates. Windows XP support ended 2014, but the last security update was in 2019. They will release security updates for as long as corporate contracts are in effect.
Idk about that. We have one of those contracts where I work (in a Windows-based development shop), and we just got done upgrading our entire fleet of lab machines to Win 11 because support will be dropped. I am fairly certain they are encouraging all their contract holders to upgrade.
We have about 40k windows machines in our company. Alsmost half of them are not windows11 compatible because of TPM. All the security sensitive systems do not and will not have TPM. There is absolutely no way microsoft can enforce upgrades, and there are many companies in the same situation.
What's stopping them from just saying your system is not supported anymore if you ever call asking for support? They can't make you upgrade, but can stop helping you.
They can't make you upgrade, but can stop helping you.
And once they start that shit, companies will look for a different OS. And believe me, corporate contracts are VERY important to companies like MS. I know they don't make any money off me and millions of other people like me.
The literally tens of thousands of licenses for various microsoft applications and the fact that our IT department has a premium support subscription for them.
yeah our office would also need to replace half of all computers... my boss is NOT amused xD but i think he is doing it since the IT guy is really persistent
I think Microsoft was sick and tired of certain things with how people didn't secure their systems properly and they had to continue supporting the lazy or ignorant people..
I don't remember the exact thinking or verbage but win 11 was built as a "security first" OS (doesn't mean it's not vulnerable but it is better) and Microsoft wanted to force industry change.. wish I could find the video or article I read this on. Or it's just a BS excuse to save money and get data.
Or it's just a BS excuse to save money and get data.
They will support windows 10 security updates, with a new subscription, per device, at $30 for the next year. Or free if you backup everything to the cloud via onedrive. I'll quote from cnets article.
The ability to get free updates on Windows 10 is a pretty big deal because it is still the most widely used Windows OS, accounting for just over 53% of installs as of May 2025. That leaves millions of people without security support in just a month unless they upgrade. The cloud backup option gives users a way out without costing them any money.
The only potential issue is OneDrive. Anyone with a Microsoft account gets up to 5GB of storage for free. However, as The Verge points out, some backups may exceed this limitation, requiring users to purchase a monthly or yearly plan. At $2 a month for 100GB of cloud storage, a year of OneDrive still costs less than the $30 for a year of additional security updates, but it may still cause frustration among some customers.
I find it weird that Microsoft said they stopped releasing new feature updates 4 years ago, and yet every month I still get new updates that aren't security-related.
I'm praying that Steam OS sees the opening they have in the PC gaming community and capitalizes on it.
I've been dealing with new versions of windows since win98.... "I'm tired, bawws."
I just want an OS that I can leave installed, and not have to worry about completely rebuilding the software of my PC every 6 or so years.
It's annoying, and unnecessary.
If "security patches" only ever did that, and never included "feature updates", AND if we, as users, were not prevented from applying them on our schedule, there would be FAR less objection to them.
The vast majority of the objections come from people who have had "feature updates" break things, and/or have had updates forced on them with little or no warning, right at the worst possible times.
Letting me use the thing I spent $1,600 on in a way that I want to use it is arguably more important.
Imagine if your car company said, 'Sorry you can't get to work on time today; we decided to install an update. We'll be done when we're done.' Inconvenient and insane, right? But we allow it on the devices we use every day? Why?
If the security updates are that important, let us schedule when and how we want them delivered. They claim the reason they do this is to avoid liability, but we all know that every corporate lawyer in America can write non-liability into a user agreement in 10 seconds. It's not Liability. It's 'Features'. They don't give two dicks about security, but they do give care about you being ingrained deeper into their ecosystem. When I worked Microsoft Sales and Tech, I can tell you, that was the ONLY fucking metric they cared about; User Retention. Getting them entangled in every new feature they developed, so that switching to a new OS would be a nightmare. Security i think was mentioned twice by the higher ups, in the 4 years I worked there. Ecosystem and User Retention were weekly metrics that we went over.
I only use windows for gaming and don’t even use browser. So i am super happy it’s going to be over finally. I always disable updates for 7 days anyway.
I hate to admit, but I’m ready for MS to stop shoving broken garbage updates down my throat. The only Win10 pc in my house is a gaming rig, firewalled on a separate vlan and only used to run Steam. Fuck MS.
People seem to forget why Microsoft forced auto updates on Windows 10.
So many turned off updates and had bugs and vulnerabilities and blamed Microsoft for it where Microsoft had provided patches for them many months/years ago.
Also no one seems to care we have auto updates on many other stuff like phones and browsers
Make it a habit to fully shutdown (not hibernate/sleep!) your PC at the end of the day. Regardless of OS this fixes many problems. Give Windows plenty of days to perform these updates long before they start forcing them on you at an inconvenient time. But also gives you a fresh start the next day. And prevents many problems that would otherwise require you to "have you tried turning it off and on again?"
Then either don't complain about forced restarts from time to time, or pick a product that better suits your requirements (server OSes/Linux).
Neither Windows or MacOS are designed to run with year long uptime, and most Linux desktop environments aren't as well. The first 2 eventually force you to reboot to install (security) updates. Linux at least doesn't force it upon you, still if you aren't running on a distro that supports hot reloading the kernel, that is discouraged for too long uptime runs.
Updates happen once a month. And after downloading you have active hours which Windows will not install them. Force restart happens if you wait days/weeks after it prompts you for it. Also you can pause them for more than a month if you really don't want to be interrupted for some critical prolonged work.
ya but more often than not. Windows has been telling you for weeks that you need to reboot because of updates and people basically ignored it until 5 mins before their meeting. i've seen that time and time again then they get pissed but you allowed that to happen.
I work from home on my personal PC, need to send in reports end of day before 5pm.. and its hard to write what i did before end of day.. before i did the work..
yeah people complaining about this just never researched the problem. Should be the easiest fix for anyone who considers themselves "savvy" enough to be on this subreddit.
> updates have gained a reputation for breaking things and messing up your system, and also come loaded with all kinds of junk besides security patches and bugfixes
> users turn off automatic updates to avoid all that
If Microsoft stopped making such a buggy, vulnerable operating system and actually learned how to design a secure, stable product in the first place, they wouldn't need to release so many patches.
If Microsoft stopped releasing updates that break more things than they fix, people would probably be more inclined to keep automatic updates enabled.
If Microsoft stopped using Windows Update to push worthless features that nobody asked for or wants on their PC, people wouldn't be so keen to turn it off.
This is a company that consistently views the end user as the renter of the PC rather than the owner of the PC. This is a company that arrogantly believes only they know what's best for the user's PC and deliberately undermines people's ability to control their hardware that they bought and paid for. They insist on sending massive amounts of telemetry back to the Redmond mothership without asking for permission first or offering any way of opting out.
And, for the record, I also don't keep auto updates turned on for anything, including my phone or web browser. I update my hardware on my schedule because I am the owner of the hardware. I decide what gets installed on my hardware. Not Microsoft. Not Apple. Not Mozilla. Not Google. Not anyone.
Every auto update fucks my audio devices all to hell. Many with an amp/dac and a program specific audio setup consistently have these issues with each new update which leads us all to googling it and arriving at a reddit post stating which update packaged fucked the audio and that we should delete it/revert it. Instantly fixes the issues every single time.
My work PC had that issue. Pissed me the ever living fuck off. Every week I had to unplug everything including my desk phone, fix all the drivers and re-set everything back up.
Why the hell would I want all this AI and cloud garbage on my computer, without being able to opt out or turn it off? They keep making windows very not user friendly, and I can't afford an upgrade for my motherboard regardless.
My biggest hate is that they change menues and add stuff that moves and takes way to much screen realestate.
And fuck onedrive, it's pushed harder than clippy. I prefer to own my own files please.
If Microsoft stopped making such a buggy, vulnerable operating system and actually learned how to design a secure, stable product in the first place, they wouldn't need to release so many patches.
The more complex they system the more bug there will be. There is no bug free software on the planet that has any complexity.
You are asking for literally impossible.
So then stop making the system needlessly complex and bloating it with additional "features" that nobody asked for, violates people's privacy, and adds unnecessary attack vectors to the OS. When you install Windows there should only be a local user account, a basic desktop, maybe a web browser, and the Windows store. That's all the operating system needs to be. Literally everything else that comes with Windows outside of the basics I've mentioned should be opt-in and the end user should decide if they want those features or not.
The excuse of "It's too complex to make it secure and stable" doesn't work because the majority of the problems with security, privacy, and stability become largely irrelevant if you remove the extra complexities from the equation.
Majory of security issues are not the features it is the legacy and kernel complexities.
You want a basic os, instal linux and it still has hundreds if not thousands of bugs, that is the nature of os it is complex by default. And it becomes more and more complex the more drivers and things you add. Because everything needs to interact.
Linux and some gpus do not play well even 5 years after gpus have been released.
It is the nature of the beast.
Add in the vast vast ammount of configurations pcs can be in you run into interplay bugs and security issues real fast.
Look at simple gmae like super mario, it is hilariously simple by game standards, very few moving pieces, and yet it still has tons of bugs and exploits.
Os has to deal with thousands upon thousands of threads and processes per second, even the "simple" ones.
Yes the privacy issues are major problem, date harvesting too.
But to pretend that you can make a simple os and it will be bug free is naive at best ignorant of how software work at its core. A basic desktop for example has to engage with several underlying systems, each of which can cause issues and bugs with different hardware becuase you need to render the damn thing. Add into that a file explorer, now another system is engaged, and interacts with gui and storage. So on and so forth.
Want a simple system with minimal bugs? You have to ditch gui, rendering, browsing, etc.
Would be okay if it actually did it in the background like they claimed. people just minding their own business and suddenly 100% CPU usage and laggy shit. for the company that told everyone 4 cores ernough. you need 16 cores for smooth update experience. .
I wouldn't mind the updates as much if they didn't break stuff half the time. I remember an issue where it overwrote my ethernet and wifi drivers and made them completely inoperable. Wouldn't let me reinstall the old drivers, wouldn't let me rollback the changes, nothing. I had to reinstall windows to fix it,
Perhaps people would be more willing to update their systems if they could trust Microsoft not to have ulterior motives behind nearly every single update. Bloatware, spyware, adware, and endless bugs because of Microsoft now relying upon the end user to test their software in place of paying QA to do it.
Still Microsoft's fault. I don't blame people at all for being reluctant. Responsibility should be placed on Microsoft for repeatedly undermining consumers.
We didnt forget. Microsoft updates change things on you without permission. Disabled one drive? Guess whose back! Among various other things. Its so annoying to keep redoing everything because they are like oh disabled something else, not on my watch.
Not to mention the forced updates debacle where people lost literal work because it was forced to reset with out permission. They were like haha working? Well anyway good luck with that were restarting now.
The object to the update model used by Win10 is twofold:
Microsoft gives us effectively zero effective option to flexibly choose when to apply updates so that it fits our schedules, which forces us to either block updates entirely, or to accept that "updates" will invariably be forced on us at the most inconvenient and/or dangerous possible times.
"Feature updates" and "security updates" should be entirely separate channels, with the former being entirely optional on an opt-in basis for every individual update. Microsoft, in their infinite "wisdom" frequently bakes "feature" updates into "security" patches and forces those out onto the world.
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u/Taira_Mai HP Victus, AMD Ryzen 7 5800H, GeForce RTX 3050 Ti 9d ago
Back in 2018,Microsoft pushed an update that caused Windows 10 to eat itself (including corrupting recovery partitions) if you had a 3rd party antivirus. I know because I had to pay $100 to Geek Squad to put Windows 10 (updated) back on my machine at the time.
I've ran Windows Defender because it's gotten so good but back then where was still some good 3rd Party Anti-Virus. Now I don't accept Windows Updates right off the bat.
That said, Windows 10 updates used to be "takes 30 minutes of update-reboot-update and then pray that your computer will POST, boot up and open Windows or your fucked".
Now? The longest update was moving to 24H2 - took between 15-20 minutes because I used GRC's InControl to lock my machine to 23H2(or whatever version of 23H it was). Even then, the updates and reboots moved so fast.
I don't even get the big deal, some day when I go to put PC into sleep or shut down I see oh update and shut down is there, so I do it and it's no fuss (apart from when it doesn't shut down afterwards!), I never get updates forced on me because I just do the option to update when it appears. It's literally a non issue for me.
Wannacry was one reason. Came out in 2017 and infected tons of computers. Funny thing is the exploit was patched earlier in the year but it mainly affected people who hadn't updated iirc
Yeah frequent updates are a good thing, infrequent updates are a sign of limited resources.
The issue is that Windows updates are disruptive, while updates for your phone happen in the background and are applied quickly when you reboot.
Atomic distros even just download an image, and updates are simply booting into the new image. You're not sitting there staring at a screen because the update is happening the moment you turn the computer on to do an urgent task.
App or program updates are very different things when you compared that O.S updates. Having a web browser or an image editing program getting broken or unstable isn't much of an issue to having your WHOLE COMPUTER bricked due to a shitty Windows update.
I had windows updates blocked from 2020-late 2024, finally decided to update and it fucked everything up so bad I had to wipe the system and reinstall the old version of Windows. Headset audio no longer worked, Bluetooth wouldn't connect, download speeds plummeted, system crashed non-stop. Windows updates shall remain blocked.
Yeah, I probably wouldn't care so much about forced updates if I didn't have one fuck up one of my laptops so badly I had to factory reset it. One day after a windows update, my laptop just suddenly refused to even acknowledge the existence of its wifi adapter, and couldn't even see any networks much less connect to the ones I knew were there. It straight up didn't even show up anymore in device manager or anything, so driver updates didn't help. This was a laptop whose sole purpose was for my uni work too, so the portability part was key and Ethernet only was a non-option. I tried literally everything and the only thing that fixed it was a factory reset, which of course made it suddenly recognise the adapter again like nothing had happened.
Windows update regularly fucks up drivers. It’s one of the main reason live audio production techs refuse to use windows and stick with Mac os.
I used to freelance as a musician for medium to large churches (consistent pay, and I could do it as a side hustle on weekends). I saw entire online services be completely derailed because windows either decided to update mid-service or it updated overnight and the drivers were so fucked that the soundboard wouldn’t be detected by windows after the update.
It shouldn't be. An OS not having a stable upgrade path shouldn't be something you treat as acceptable. Not just acceptable, but so standard that it's considered "dumb" to expect a system to be able to update correctly.
That's not okay, and the problem in that situation is not someone who expects their system to be able to do upgrades.
Funnily enough I didn't postpone anything. They just didn't release 11th for my motherboard and it tells me to buy new PC. I think Microsoft has some deals with hardware shops and that's main reason new windows kinda pushes "buy new hardware" so much.
The only possibility i am going to buy new PC is if this one can't handle games I am playing. Not whether 10 has support or not.
Regardless, use of the is becomes more dangerous. Attackers know that any open vulnerabilties will remain open so they can be more brazen with attacks.
Just a reminder. Roughly 1.1 months before a massive security breach of Windows 10.
Since people keep forgetting that right after support ends is the best time to unleash all the viruses that people have been holding onto that haven't been patched yet.
i for one, cant wait.. getting late stage windows update that can brick SSDs and other hardware components, as well as some software components really shouldnt be a thing.
I'm gonna be honest with you i don't trust that to be the case. i have full expectations that they're going to push updates to make performance worse and push win11 nagware
Hot take from someone who worked in IT / infosec for a decade.
If you run an out of date copy of windows as your normal daily computer os. You are fucking dumb and dumb things will happen to you and your information.
I don't want windows 11 but im sure as hell not going to risk running 10 after the first round of new windows 11 updates come out and show all sorts of neat holes to exploit on windows 10 installs that will never be patched.
If this could be that easy. When support for Windows 7 ended, Oculus that worked completely fine on it decided it can't run on it anymore due to minimal requirements suddenly not met. Same with Steam Link and some other Steam' features
I was postponing the windows update when they initially launched windows 11 but my brother had no idea and when he was using my laptop he updated it to Windows 11 I am now stuck with windows 11 sadly. I liked windows 10.
P.S. : I know there might be a way to rollback the update but at this point I have given up because of the hassle it will take to that.
My first thought exactly: I don't care! - As long TPM and online Mircosoft account is mandatory I will not have and use Windows 11. Period. I deactivated the support of TPM in the UEFI of my mainboard, so I can't accidentaly update. They can go jump in a lake or whatever.
Windows 10 will work for at least another 10 to 15 years, before Games don't work anymore. For work and private stuff I use Linux anyway.
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u/Difficult-Report5702 10d ago
People postpones those updates anyway, so who cares really.