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You haven't had support since it was released. Why should EOL make things any different.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
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Which elements of the support are truly essential to you?
Not very much of it means anything to me. I once had a virus infection, of the kind that was called a "boot sector virus" (if you never heard of that before, ask your grandpa). After that it has been quiet. Probably because it is not my habit to jump around all over the Internet searching for dubious pictures and other dubious stuff. When I receive an email telling me that I have won the first prize in a lottery I never heard of, I click the "delete" button rather than the "collect your prize here" button. Every day I delete from 20 to 50 spam mails without even opening them. Even when something appears to come from a recognized company, I always hover over the links to see if the URLs are reasonable. If they are not, I delete the mail.
The same goes for links in web pages: For years, I have had the "hover before click" habit. If the real URL is different from the displayed one, or when the display text is in a "user friendly" format rather than a URL, but the real URL looks dubious, then I never click it.
Also: The "Local Area Connection" icon has for years had a firm position in the upper left hand corner of my screen. Before I start any Internet related work, I double click it to enable the connection. As soon as I am done Internetting and start, say, editing a document or open Visual Studio, I rignt click / disable the network connection. The network connection is enabled only when I am actively using it. In theory I am still not 100% safe, but I haven't had any boot sector virus on my PC lately 
My PC is a tool for doing "serious" work (/hobbies), and for retrieving (reasonably) reliable information: I go to recognized, reliable web sites for information (yes, that includes Code Project ) and a handful of web newspaper and similar services, such as the weather forecast. As far as possible I avoid any web offering spying on me, so I have neither FB, Twitter, Flickr or similar accounts - and the Windows support wouldn't protect me from that sort of threats anyway. Another one of my good habits: If I am forced to log in somewhere, the minimum level of privacy protection is to immediately afterwards close down the net browser completely before doing anything else. Logging out, or preferably restarting the PC, reduces the risk of spying further. Even if you accept cookies for the sake of convenience, doing a weekly cleanup (or more often) of cookies from sites you do not recognize, is a worthwhile effort to keep you out of the eyes of those wanting to exploit you one way or the other. (Again, we are talking about threats that continued W7 support wouldn't help you against in any case!)
You still will have the protection against all the currently known malware; the ones that could be a threat are those developed anno 2020 or later. The less people use W7, the less the threat will be - no intruder today cares to develop malware attacking Win 3.11 vulnurabilities. Hardly Win95 ones. W7 will be safer and safer, as time goes on. The general proctection mechanisms have become quite good over the years, the new ones are essentially in the class "you asked for it, you got it". You opened a dubious web site, you accepted some attractive-looking special offer. And you did it logged in as a user having Administrator privileges...
Another essential point: I keep my data on separate disks, not on C:, and all the disks are backed up, incrementally, day by day, and the backup is offline (and offsite, but that is not relevant here). Ransomware is often be so simplistic that it only considers C:, but if that happens to me, I will simply reformat C: and reinstall all the software. All installers are saved on an external disk. If some ransomware actually attacks my 14 terabytes on other disks (yes, I am doing a lot of HD video editing on my PC. but I assume that you guessed that...), I might loose the edits I have made that same day, before I got around to make the incremental backup. I can live with that risk.
Bottom line: With good working habits, you will be reasonably well protected. There is no need to panic.
If you really have to surf around the Internet for dubious information, do it on another PC, maybe an old, clunky secondhand one that you got almost for free. If you "must" have the material you obtain that way accessible on your main computer, use a USB stick to move the JPEGs and MP4s over.
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Thanks for this info. I am already a cautious browser and I do
backups regularly. I guess I'll get the best antivirus I can
find and soldier on!
73
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You sound very paranoid, I had Windows 7 update shut off for 3 years, I never had any malware or viruses on any of my machines.
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Member 10794313 wrote:
You sound very paranoid, I had Windows 7 update shut off for 3 years, I never had any malware or viruses on any of my machines.
Don't try this at home kids.
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You've never heard of a 0-day?
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An AV, free or not, doesn't help that much. A rigorous whitelist of things allowed to run plus, best case, no (direct) internet connection is the way to go.
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I have been using windows 7 at home without updates for 5 years.
No antivirus, but I am more or less careful, mostly execute trustable software, Steam, visual studio..
Have some security software: EMET, Simplewall
Disable unnecessary services, for speed and security.
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ZoneAlarm + Avira antivirus + very careful when browsing. I have several customers that run Windows XP machines (due to proprietary software restrictions that they use), connected to the Internet using these packages in addition to Firefox/Tor. The main element will always be good judgment and caution.
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Take a look at Sandboxie which enables one to run any program, but especially browsers in a sandbox.
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Yes! I have it and like it!
73
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My beloved Win7 box is still going strong. I use it to test my software and for Quickbooks etc. I have simply unplugged it from the internet. It seems to be running faster now than it has for years without a bunch of apps desperately trying to auto-update themselves.
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McAfee, Kaspersky, Avira, Malwarebytes, AVG, BitDefender, ScanGuard, Total AV, and etc. have good products that are free*(at the cost of telemetry, of course, but which company doesn't this day?, besides is the best way to keep ahead and up to date with all kinds of common malware's); but this days, fighting the day-to-day good fight is on the abuse of massive advertisement, the planting of "cookies" for tracking and profiling trought it and etc, about that, just an open (manageable) and good "Web Browsers" will do the job, the modern ones are still compatible with such OS version and have the option of add-ons/plug-ins that can alleviate such load (bandwidth + CPU/GPU usage).
Otherwise all apart from the rest is just mental!...
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Yes, thx for the list. I read somewhere that BitDefender
had good reviews.
73
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I will be using Win 7 on my wife's computer until one of us is dead--or she really ticks me off--and both events may occur at the same time.
I simply do not want to put up with the gnashing of teeth, complaining, and 5AM wakeups that "My computer isn't working: I can't get Dr. Phil video's on my screen."
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Well, I presented a demo of the tool (written with WPF) on Wednesday, and as of yesterday, as a proof of concept exercise, the team (five devs) had successfully generated over 1600 (validated) model classes with it - spending a combined 15 minutes on the task.
I'm gonna call that a win.
Semi-related note: I found out that nobody else on the team has ANY experience with WPF. To say I was a bit surprised is an understatement.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
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Hi John, none of the programmers I know ( myself included ) have used WPF, I played with it a bit but never used it in anger
"We can't stop here - this is bat country" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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Same here.
Back when it was "hot" (if it ever was) I was still doing WinForms development and my company looked at WPF for a while, but we decided to stick with WinForms.
I think I used a WPF control on a WinForm once, but that's about it.
If I did serious desktop development now I'd sooner consider Electron[^], which uses plain HTML rather than XAML, with JavaScript or TypeScript, and runs cross platform.
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And me - I looked at it, and thought it was a nice control stack, but the design tools just didn't seem "finished", making it all look like amateur hour compared to WinForms. I decided to leave it and let it get out of prototype before I invested in significant learning: the designer is still the same, so I haven't got any closer.
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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I remember from that time that Microsoft recommended typing out your entire XAML, despite having a designer 
The main issue, I believe, was that the designer generated a constant width and height while it should've been relative or some enum value.
From a design perspective, the greatest pro to WPF was responsiveness, something which WinForms isn't very good at.
However, with those constant width and height it didn't scale at all 
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I only use the designer to make sure everything is lining up - I still type the xaml by hand. Like anything else you're just starting out with, you adapt as you learn where the quirks are.
BTW, I don't have problems with constant width/height. I make copious use of row and column definitions set to either Auto or *, and almost always let the controls inside the grid determine their own widths/heights. The hardest thing to deal with is how font sizes can affect everything, especially if you have a user control object that is supposed to inherit the parent element's font properties.
I prefer WPF to Winforms, if for no other reason than the data binding and enforcement of almost fanatical MVVM use. I did this app in a week and a half.
I'll try to un-workify it and post an article.
Finally, if you're at all interested, I found that the best way to learn WPF is to duplicate one of your old WinForms apps as a WPF app. It will not only help you learn WPF, but can also serve to show you where your winforms app could have been made better.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
-----
You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
-----
When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
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I'd be interested in seeing an article John
"We can't stop here - this is bat country" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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For what it's worth I skipped WinForms entirely and went straight to WPF. I was developing the UI for a new product, with my choices being our existing C++/MFC implementation or changing to C#/.NET. WinForms seemed to be a relatively thin layer over the Windows API, and wasn't an improvement over MFC. WPF offered vastly more flexible layout handling and a lot more basic capability out-of-the-box.
The end result is a nice-looking, adaptive, 'fluent' user interface in an industry where most UI's are an afterthought with no regard for the system operator. There are products out there where the $2M machine has a text-mode  user interface.
Software Zen: delete this;
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