They're going to keep supporting 7 for a couple years or so. 2020 at the latest, I think I heard, but eventually, yeah, there'll be a cutoff. Your OS won't die or anything, but virus protection updates and such will stop, and things will start to break down. I kept Windows '95 going on an old computer until 2010, and I could still do basic functions, but Youtube stopped working, and sites with lots of flash crashed the thing unless I adblocked the shit out of them. I jumped over to 10 to be ahead of that this time.
So it's like cable. You sign up at $29 a month and all of a sudden you're paying $129+ a month...and it still goes down in the middle of the day when you need to send a file back to a client. Got it. Yeah, pass.
It all depends on what you need. Windows 7 is still great for most people, but by 2020 it will have aged horribly just like Windows XP (even though XP is still usable, it lacks hardware options that new OSes can use). Microsoft has said they want Windows 10 to be the last OS. I'll believe it when I see it, but for now Windows 10 is the last OS to be distributed this way. The likelihood in the future is that the OS will simply be patched and updated as the years move forward. There will come a point where everyone will have to have Windows 10, and previous versions will not be supported at all, at least I think that will happen. Next year, anyone who didn't get a copy of Windows 10 free, will have to pay about $120 for it. Right now, there are well over 14 million Windows 10 users, and I expect that number to jump even higher by this time next year, so who knows? Maybe Microsoft will just give it away anyway then, too. By 2020, though, the standard Windows OS we've come to know and love will have (probably) bit the big one, so you'll have to either accept it, or switch to Linux or Mac.
no, I upgraded from win7 to 10 on two machines, one a current I3, one an 8 year old Dell core2. Both run well and are very user friendly. I keep windows8 on the TVPC as win10 doesn't support windows media center. No reason not to upgrade from 7. Both printers I use (7 year old lexmark laser and 5 year old HP officejet/scanner) both work much better under win10 than they did under either XP or win7. The Dell XP was upgraded to win7 when XP support ended. It does everything better under win10. And it's free. You can always try it and revert to win7. It keeps a copy for 30days to roll back to (consuming another 30gb on your HD. After 30days this backup is deleted), or you can clean up earlier if your'e happy with win10. What? at some point they may stop offering a free upgrade, but that's just a millstone around your neck. I'd look on your printer's support page and download new USB drivers for it. The native support for printers under win10 for my legacy printers is very good, but I still downloaded HP drivers to get full functionality for the scanner. HP's printers were a pig under XP. Barely notice them now under win10. The Lexmark I use win10 native drivers.
I would be tempted to drop the coin on a 64 bit version of XP if I knew I could get all my games to work on it.
There's no 64bit version of XP. 64bit might be a little faster (Vista, Win7, Win10) and all of these can run in XP mode, but any programs you have for XP are written in 32bit so it's a wash. The main thing about 64bit OS's is they can address more than 4GB of RAM. The underlying machine instruction set may be a little more rich for programs written to take advantage of it. Unless you typically run VMs or have lots of user accounts logged on at the same time 4GB is enough.
Actually, there is a 64 bit version of XP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP_Professional_x64_Edition
And just this morning, I finally got my laptop to upgrade to Windows 10. I gave up trying last year because it'd always fail and rollback to 8.1. This morning, I said, "Fuck it." and gave it a shot. Took a little longer than when I upgraded the uber-PC I built last year, but it did it without a hiccup, amazingly enough.
