Microsft took away the help files from their office products a couple versions ago. Now you have to look online for help.

Oh, I agree with you. However, I try to keep everything constant. A lot of times change is not actually forced on you, you force it on yourself. For example, I drive the same car as always. Now, others may think that because the car is old and they should get a newer one "because it is newer" I don't. I use a lot of old devices.

Or the wish to get a new phone even though the old one still works. "It is newer" is never the reason I buy something. The newer thing may better suit my needs or something like that, but not just because it is newer.

Also, Windows 7 will not stop working after the support ends. Windows XP still works, so do Windows 98 and Windows 3.10. What is going to happen is that gradually the newer software and hardware stops supporting the old OSs, so you have problems installing Windows XP (or 7) in a brand new PC. Then you are left with a choice of only using old software or finally changing the OS. The security issues exist, but their impact is overblown IMO, unless you connect the PC directly to internet without any router (with NAT) or firewall.

I really dislike Windows 10 because of the spying and the constant updates (with forced reboots). So, the only way I am using Windows 10 is after disabling as much of the spying as I can and disabling updates (because updates enable the spying). So, I just created a "unsuported, no-updates" version of Windows 10, thats pretty much what Windows 7 is going to become.

I absolutely despise UI changes in software (and the tablet-y modern UI in general, example is Windows 8 and 10). If something was done the same way for 10 years and now you are changing it, I can only think of one reason - to make me go look for how it is done now.

Thankfully, some software is customizable, Firefox, for example, can be made to look almost like version 3 (well, not exactly, but good enough for me).

On 12/13/2019 at 6:31 AM, Pentium100 said:

I absolutely despise UI changes in software

Yeah, tell me about it.

Well, as far as the OS issue goes, I know exactly what I'm going to do.  I'm going to do what I should have done ten years ago--I'm going to say "goodbye" to crusty old Windows forever and take the Linux plunge.  Probably gonna go with Mint.  Maybe Kubuntu.

Yeah, there are good changes but most are just lateral changes or changes for the worst.

A good example of lateral change is tv. People used to say streaming would make us free to watch anything we want and let us stop being slaves to the cable companies. Now we're slaves to the streaming companies and we can watch anything they feel like carrying.