On 01/29/2017 05:50 PM, rbowman wrote:
On 01/29/2017 03:38 PM, Dan Espen wrote:
I think W7 is way ahead of 8.1 unless you have a touch screen. But
telling someone to use W7 is hopeless. They'll be on W10 before they
know it.


I'm crossing my fingers but I disabled updates on my 7 laptop when MS
was force-feeding 10. I've re-enabled them after the 'free' upgrade
ended and so far it's not nagging me or downloading 10 just in case.

One thing to watch out for is they backported the customer telemetry
crap to 7. You can turn all of it off but them might turn it back on
again with the next 'important' update. They use the Pelosi technique --
install it to find out what is in it.



My windows machines are in Virtual Machines (VM) (qemu-kvm). Except
for Windows Nein (W10), where I have to see what idiot update is
happening "today", I turn off Windows' Idiot updates. What
an absolute pain-in-the-ass. I keep gold copies of my vm's
in case Windows does the Windows thing. I go love being able
to test some trash out in an VM, then overwrite the VM/s hard
drive with my gold copy.

I surf from my base machine, which is a Red Hat clone. My
VM's have very restrictive Internet access or none at all.