Living with Windows 7: Party Like It’s 2009 (Premium)

Some readers seem to have missed the point of me going to the trouble of installing, configuring, and using Windows 7 here in January 2020. This isn’t about the first two of those tasks, installing and configuring. It’s about the third.

That is, literally one-third of all PC users in the world—about 500 million people, using Microsoft’s usage numbers—are still running Windows 7 today. And the clock is ticking. So the goal here is to discover what it’s like sticking with the most popular Windows version of all time in its waning days. And, as its support lifecycle ticks away, what it’s like to continue using Windows 7 into the unknown.

I’m not alone, of course. Literally hundreds of millions of people will do this, and they will not heed Microsoft’s advice to buy a new Windows 10 PC in order to stay up-to-date with software and security patches. They will, instead, stick with what works.

I respect that decision. Even in my limited recent usage of Windows 7 so far, I’ve been reminded of what it’s like to have a version of Windows that just gets the f@#k out of my way and isn’t constantly bombarding me with ads, crapware, and unnecessarily aggressive software updates. I’ve been reminded of how professional and pretty the Aero Glass user interface is. And of the many now-missing features that we, as Windows 10 users, have forgotten about.

But I’m not doing this permanently. My goal is to use Windows 7 regularly through its mid-January end-of-support milestone, record my findings, and then go back to Windows 10 while checking in from time-to-time to see what’s changed. The nature of this experiment necessitated me going through the awful task of just figuring out how to install Windows 7 on modern hardware—again, this system predates such modern niceties as USB 3.0 and M.2-based SSD, and its Setup application can’t even see those devices—and then get it fully-updated and configured so it can actually be used.

But my overview of that process was purposefully brief. I don’t feel that anyone should go to the trouble of installing Windows 7 today, no matter the perceived benefits. This OS will literally be orphaned this very month. Windows 10, hell, even Windows 8.1, is a much better choice, even given the downsides noted above and elsewhere on this site (as recently as this very week).

I will say that the immediate familiarity of Windows 7 has its benefits. When I evaluate non-Windows platforms like macOS, Linux, Chrome OS, Android, iOS, and others, mostly privately, but sometimes publicly, as with my Living with Chromebook series, I find that the biggest barrier to this transition is workflow-related. Windows 7 benefits, well, from being Windows. It’s familiar in that it works very much like Windows 10 works today. And, in my case, because the things that are different are still familiar and remembered. It really is like riding a bike.

A couple of examples.

In Windows 10, you can display the Quick Access menu—which many misidentify as “a second hidden Start menu” or “the power user menu”—by right-clicking the Start button (or by typing WINKEY + X). This menu provides access to many legacy utilities, like Device Manager and Disk Management. It’s a handy thing if you know how to look.

While installing Windows 7, I needed to access Device Manager many times to see whether my hardware devices were correctly configured with drivers. In Windows 7, you can find this tool via Start Search (just like in Windows 10), but there’s no Quick Access menu. That said, I used Windows 7 so much that I remember that I could also open the Start menu, right-click Computer, and select Manage to access the Computer Management console, which provides access to many of the same legacy tools as does Quick Access, but in a single window. And that’s how I’ve been viewing Device Manager.

And then there’s the Control Panel. Oh you magic being, you.

One of the big questions for Windows 10 users—OK, enthusiasts using Windows 10, I guess—is when Microsoft will finally obliterate the Control Panel and replace it fully with the more modern Settings app. This question is misguided for a number of reasons. But one thing that Windows 10 users probably forget is that Control Panel is superior to Settings. And one of the key ways that’s so is that you can have as many Control Panel windows open as you want.

To see what I mean, open Windows Update in Windows 10. Then, right-click on the desktop and choose Personalize. The Settings app window that was displaying Windows Update changes to the Personalize view.

Now, try this in Windows 7. When you open Personalize, it opens in its own window, even though both Windows Update and Personalize are part of Control Panel. You can keep doing it: Screen resolution (accessed by right-clicking the desktop), Add or remove programs (via Start Search perhaps), whatever. They all open in their own window.

So the questions Windows 10 users should be asking could include when, if ever, Settings will be as sophisticated as Control Panel. Or when Microsoft will simply go back to using Control Panel and abandon Settings for good. (Kidding. But seriously.)

Windows 7 isn’t all peaches and cream, of course. In addition to the tedious updating requirements—and, again, I am positive Microsoft left this untouched and unfixed in order to drive adoption of Windows 8.x and then Windows 10—many things that are automatic or fast in Windows 10 are manual or slow in Windows 7.

The best example is Microsoft account sign-in: Where Windows 10 almost forces you to sign-in with a Microsoft account (as an individual user), the benefit is that those credentials pass through to applications and, most especially, to Microsoft Edge. In Windows 7, that does not happen, and I’ve had to deal with my MSA 2-factor sign-in multiple times. Many more times than is the case in Windows 10.

Device driver installs can be tedious and are always slower than is the case with Windows 10. For example, in Windows 7, you need to find and then download the drivers for your Microsoft mouse and keyboard. And the download screen that comes up is comically terrible. Have fun with that!

But these are tasks that generally only occur at the beginning of the process. For most of those 500 million people using Windows 7 today, all that is done. And Windows 7 just works.

And to be clear, Windows 7 does just work.

In fact, it is the last version of Windows which I think meets the bar of being very much like macOS in that regard. It’s clean and minimalist looking. It runs all the applications I want to run, including the latest browsers with PWA integration. It has native OneDrive support. It’s the complete package.

And it is about to be unsupported.

I think one could make a good case for Windows 7 being the last “real” successor to Windows NT, the last version of Windows that was focused on the desktop and only on the desktop. That it arrived just as the iPhone was starting to explode and only one year before the iPad is, of course, a matter of historical coincidence. But it was created at a time when Microsoft believed that for Windows to be great, it just had to be … Windows. I can see why people might want to hold on to this. I really can.