Windows 10/11 Download
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Currently I have 3 windows computers.
1. This one if my newest one that came with windows 11 and it runs fine and is used as my daily for personal work and internet surfing.
2. I have a Microsoft Surface Pro that is a couple years old and I recently allowed it to upgrade to windows 11. So far it is running fine. I use it mostly for travel and getting ready to travel. I have full security suite and VPN installed on it and have no trouble connecting through my iphone hotspot or using a secure wifi network via Starlink on a cruise ship I most recently tested and experienced. But the cruise ship required no VPN to work.
3. This is my most powerful computer and I use it only for video editing. It is still on windows 10 and is windows 11 capable but I keep it in win 10 64bit Professional because I have some older video editing software that I still use and I'm concerned some will not work in windows 11. I know one software app, a special paint graphics package, I had on computer number 1 does not work on win 11. Since retiring from professional editing it's just a hobby these days but I still enjoy the capability of this system.
So the question I have for you OS experts is how long can I continue to use windows 10 on this expensive professional level computer?
Speed is not an issue as for my 360VR and 3D video editing feeding 3 monitors and an Oculus HMD works flawlessly and more than adequate for my needs. I would only upgrade to win 11 if forced to.
I understand that some day Microsoft will force an upgrade as they will no longer support windows 10. I saw that with windows 7 years ago and lost a number of apps when I was forced to upgrade.
1. This one if my newest one that came with windows 11 and it runs fine and is used as my daily for personal work and internet surfing.
2. I have a Microsoft Surface Pro that is a couple years old and I recently allowed it to upgrade to windows 11. So far it is running fine. I use it mostly for travel and getting ready to travel. I have full security suite and VPN installed on it and have no trouble connecting through my iphone hotspot or using a secure wifi network via Starlink on a cruise ship I most recently tested and experienced. But the cruise ship required no VPN to work.
3. This is my most powerful computer and I use it only for video editing. It is still on windows 10 and is windows 11 capable but I keep it in win 10 64bit Professional because I have some older video editing software that I still use and I'm concerned some will not work in windows 11. I know one software app, a special paint graphics package, I had on computer number 1 does not work on win 11. Since retiring from professional editing it's just a hobby these days but I still enjoy the capability of this system.
So the question I have for you OS experts is how long can I continue to use windows 10 on this expensive professional level computer?
Speed is not an issue as for my 360VR and 3D video editing feeding 3 monitors and an Oculus HMD works flawlessly and more than adequate for my needs. I would only upgrade to win 11 if forced to.
I understand that some day Microsoft will force an upgrade as they will no longer support windows 10. I saw that with windows 7 years ago and lost a number of apps when I was forced to upgrade.
Does that mean no more security updates or getting your computer shut off and not even being able to boot up?
The current version of Windows 10 is 22H2. This will be the final version. After 14 October 2025 there will be no security updates or tech support.
If you don't use machine #3 to do anything other than your video applications (no e-mail, no web browsing, no web apps), you can run it as long as the hardware holds together (assuming other computers on the networks are maintained).
If you run any Adobe software (and I mean any), make sure you keep that software updated (using the built-in update features).
I caution against running any "handy utilities" (especially third party driver and software updating tools). The "attack surface" needs to be minimized if you're not going to get fixes and hot patches from the company that botched the system in the first place.
Thanks for the advice. I was hoping you were going to weigh in.
I do connect to the internet on that machine, mostly to upload and work my YT channel which is the longest time I'm on line. I do keep windows updated. I also edit using subscription adobe Premiere Pro most of the time. I have a 3rd party hard drive cloning package that I use to keep clones of my OS NVME drive. Adobe forces frequent updates so I do that anytime it requires. I was upset when they went subscription only but for $20.99 a month it is affordable for me as I use it often and have it loaded on all three computers. Rarely I use MS365 Office for Excel and word. I have webmail for my domain name email that is secured by network solutions. It has a scavenger feature that I like as it captures any email sent to my domain.
To TheForce.
I would be interested in knowing the applications that you believe won't work under 11.
The migration from XP to 7-8, etc.certainly did kill a lot of peripherals that worked just fine.
Graphics cards, BT dongles, USB card readers. My Radeon All in Wonder tuner/GPU card. I'm sure a lot of other things too.
Currently with 11, the Prolific FTDA cable shipped with my ASC-1 suddenly just stopped working.
"Obsolete" or something like that was shown in Dev. mgr. But it always worked just fine for my purposes.
I found a work around and with a few minutes of piddling. It works again. Then persistently went back to being obsoleted.
Then discovered how to permanently disable MS installing it's own thingy that killed it.
Of the 4 pc's I regularly use here. An Asus Formula with a Xeon and a buttload of RAM. This Q552. And in my garage an Asus Sabertooth X58 with a Xeon and as much RAM as it can take.
All are 11 incompatible if MS had it's way. So, there is the Rufus and Ghost Spectre methods to get them to work.
And so far they are rock-solid. Seriously. The newest, the Q552, is fast. Boots fast. All apps work just fine.
Corel 2024 breezes along. All of my SDR apps work well. And it doesn't crash.
Hell. I can't remember many, if any BSOD's since 10. Maybe a few. But I beat my computers with a ball bat too.
My newest is an Asus ROG gaming laptop. I got the 11 upgrade notification. Went for it. No real issues at all.
But. For me anyway. I never like upgrades. I go for the new install method. I don't want to carry old baggage into an upgrade.
Certainly cloning your storage device to an external drive for safe keeping before trying 11 would be a good idea.
I use Acronis Home bootable cloning software. My preference. I keep snapshots of my current OS for the pc's I do use and beat up on purpose.
There are a few annoyances with an 11 install. The taskbar. Log in using a MS account. Can't freakin' see the pc on your lan. All can be worked out with a bit of patting Google on the back to hook a brotha' up!
Of course I'm very positive that there are facilities that are still using 95 all the way up to XP. As long as they control a machine and are never exposed to anything more than a lan for file transfers.
I keep an XP bootable partition here to run USB flash storage recovery software. To flash the chips if they become corrupted and such. XP is the only OS that will do it. So it makes me think if that is exactly what the manufactures are using also.
Jeez. I got the entire IT dept. peed at me once because they felt the need to put in a PO for a 6 grand+ terminal sever with Citrix, and multiple seat licenses. Just so the remote facilities could input Excel data into sheets to be compiled into a daily report and for the billing dept.
I looked at all of the old blades they had in storage. Picked one out. A nice one. Installed XP on it and with a one line regedit. Any number of people could log into it the RDP and do their deeds.
Of course I didn't see any change in my paycheck. But still.
Slap up those questionable applications that you feel will not work under 11. I'm interested. Ve haf vays, ja!
I would be interested in knowing the applications that you believe won't work under 11.
The migration from XP to 7-8, etc.certainly did kill a lot of peripherals that worked just fine.
Graphics cards, BT dongles, USB card readers. My Radeon All in Wonder tuner/GPU card. I'm sure a lot of other things too.
Currently with 11, the Prolific FTDA cable shipped with my ASC-1 suddenly just stopped working.
"Obsolete" or something like that was shown in Dev. mgr. But it always worked just fine for my purposes.
I found a work around and with a few minutes of piddling. It works again. Then persistently went back to being obsoleted.
Then discovered how to permanently disable MS installing it's own thingy that killed it.
Of the 4 pc's I regularly use here. An Asus Formula with a Xeon and a buttload of RAM. This Q552. And in my garage an Asus Sabertooth X58 with a Xeon and as much RAM as it can take.
All are 11 incompatible if MS had it's way. So, there is the Rufus and Ghost Spectre methods to get them to work.
And so far they are rock-solid. Seriously. The newest, the Q552, is fast. Boots fast. All apps work just fine.
Corel 2024 breezes along. All of my SDR apps work well. And it doesn't crash.
Hell. I can't remember many, if any BSOD's since 10. Maybe a few. But I beat my computers with a ball bat too.
My newest is an Asus ROG gaming laptop. I got the 11 upgrade notification. Went for it. No real issues at all.
But. For me anyway. I never like upgrades. I go for the new install method. I don't want to carry old baggage into an upgrade.
Certainly cloning your storage device to an external drive for safe keeping before trying 11 would be a good idea.
I use Acronis Home bootable cloning software. My preference. I keep snapshots of my current OS for the pc's I do use and beat up on purpose.
There are a few annoyances with an 11 install. The taskbar. Log in using a MS account. Can't freakin' see the pc on your lan. All can be worked out with a bit of patting Google on the back to hook a brotha' up!
Of course I'm very positive that there are facilities that are still using 95 all the way up to XP. As long as they control a machine and are never exposed to anything more than a lan for file transfers.
I keep an XP bootable partition here to run USB flash storage recovery software. To flash the chips if they become corrupted and such. XP is the only OS that will do it. So it makes me think if that is exactly what the manufactures are using also.
Jeez. I got the entire IT dept. peed at me once because they felt the need to put in a PO for a 6 grand+ terminal sever with Citrix, and multiple seat licenses. Just so the remote facilities could input Excel data into sheets to be compiled into a daily report and for the billing dept.
I looked at all of the old blades they had in storage. Picked one out. A nice one. Installed XP on it and with a one line regedit. Any number of people could log into it the RDP and do their deeds.
Of course I didn't see any change in my paycheck. But still.
Slap up those questionable applications that you feel will not work under 11. I'm interested. Ve haf vays, ja!
Anyone that is using Excel for data collection and manipulation deserves every moment of frustration they get. This is what web-based application software is for.
The big benefit to web-based stuff (at least the applications that don't involve Microsoft tools) is that your data is independent of any tinkering to file formats that Microsoft might engage in. It is also multi-user by default so entry personnel don't have to take turns.
My big concern with e-mail is that mess that is Outlook (or, as I prefer, Outluck) for those that are under Microsoft's Office curse. Webmail probably isn't as immune from attack as one might hope. E-mail remains a fairly big attack surface no matter how you do it.
Unless your e-mail is being pre-processed by a service that painstakingly filters all mail (I used to use Proofpoint), I'd suggest doing that communications on a different machine. Now that my domain is only for my personal use (I used to run five company's e-mails on an old 60MHz desktop computer), I run rspamd and ClamAV that have thus far met my needs (since I've never felt compelled to open every Office document and PDF that comes along). I've also switched to using a Virtual Private Server (VPS) to avoid all the hassles with operating servers out of my home. Costs me $7/month.
Anything involving a chromium-based browser gives me the willies.
Windows 11 was forced onto my work PC last week. So far I’m pleasantly surprised that all of my applications run perfectly. Not just Office apps, but even those that I built myself using Visual Studio 15 and earlier.
I agree on that. But some people at the place lived on it. Some actually used it as a defacto standard. For a time the billing dept. used Excel solely for customer tracking and billing purposes with all of the garbage formulas and macros that made no sense to me at all. Until one day a peddler showed up with his custom sw package that tailored to the industry.
Office modules are still buried in software. Even if not in your face.
But you have to agree. Job postings are engulfed with MS Office, Excel, Access experience needed.
When was the last time you saw Libre Office or Open Office fluidity mandatory?
I use Thunderbird. Works for me.Has forever. Everyone else at work used Outlook.
An email server my give you some or as much account control on their end as they wish.
A hill of beans if you associate your local email client with one. I like being able to use T-bird offline or searching for particular correspondence, attachments. Or online with rules and sub-folders. No slaps in the face when your server decides to flush mail older than...or if your box gets too full.
Out of the rat race now. I don't know too many people who use an email client. Webmail is what they use. But then again, I live in the sticks.
When I did leave my previous employer. They were fast migrating to servers buried in the U.S Treasury in Jacksonville.
And then the geeks were replacing desktop pc's for dumb terminals. With mandatory VPN. With pick and choose who was allowed to log in outside the facility.
With Level One managing it all remotely from Colorado. If there was a glitch. My hands were freed.
Place a trouble call. And then wait for a "typical 2 hour response". Still. People would stare at me, like I was able to do the magic I was able to for all of the previous years.
The CEO went livid one day on me. Furious. "The Internet was down". Because his Outlook was dead. I gave him a phone number. His son, the brainiac who invented it all. Then calmly but sternly told him to turn around, walk away, and compose himself before coming back to me. And kept my job.
Up until that day I never, ever didn't ever give a you-know-what. Starts with "f".
There are numerous ways to avoid logging in with a Microsoft account. By far the easiest is if you have Pro or above, just choose the option to join to a domain during the initial set up. Zero effort required.
ExplorerPatcher can restore the Windows 10 style taskbar, but that coding is supposedly going to be removed in 24H2. Now that you can ungroup items and show labels in the task bar I don't have many qualms with the stock taskbar. I just hate that you can't remove the Bell icon down by the clock and you can't remove the volume icon. I don't do notifications on anything, I don't want the bell icon. Ever since keyboards started coming with volume buttons, I don't need the volume icon in the tray.
Not sure what you mean by can't see PCs on your LAN.
Since when has that ever been a thing? Why wouldn't it boot up?
After Oct 14 2025, there will be no more security updates, but it will be fully functional. No different than Windows 7 after January 14 2020, Windows XP on April 8 2014 and Windows 2000 on July 13 2010
Various Windows 10 IoT LTSB/C editions are in support from 2026 - 2032. While I'm not expecting it, I wouldn't be 100% shocked to see a registry tweak discovered that would trick the OS into thinking it was an IoT sku, similar how you could get Windows XP updates until 2019 by tricking it it think it was XP Embedded
Network Solutions webmail has been trouble free, unlike Outlook that often refused to cooperate with access to my email server in the background. NS made their app emulate the features in Outlook so I have auto filing for many of my emails. Being an election year I het hundreds of spam a day. Every evening I trash out 600 to a thousand spams. Every email is scanned for malware at NS and I do it again here with AVG and Malwarebytes. Flags the bad stuff. I do spend quite a bit $$$ every year for malware protection and been years since I had an attack sneak through.
Not only does the code exist but as they discover workarounds, they are "addressing" (disabling) them. The early solution was to scan for the executable file of the utility by file name but now they're going deeper. Flexibility will not be tolerated until two or major releases down the road when Microsoft comes up with their "solution" to restoring some of the lost functionality in a more "you'll like this new version better" way.
Windows 11 is all about supporting Microsoft and its business partners (especially those partners involved in marketing and consumer research).
Given that Windows 10 gained back some market share from Windows 11 in the past few months, I'm betting they are going to think hard about extending their Windows 10 support deadline.
Then you either need a new e-mail address or a mail service that cleans out all the garbage and provides you with an exception list. Network Solutions may be talking the big talk but any self-respecting monitoring service should be trapping most of that spam.
Actually they have that but I have to go in and select what is junk on each one. I've done that but with the election year I now need to do that again. I can screen key words like politician's name in the email and send those to trash. I've done a few today that are starting to hit me with dozens a day.
Other spam can't be grouped like which comes from Amazon. Hard to select the spam from the important stuff like when an order is shipped.
I have way too much tied to my domain name so that will never happen. That kind of advice is good for your clients with a gmail account that gets out of hand, but I'm sure you would never suggest that to change the identity of a commercial client who has their identity tied to a name for 50 years. It began when I started teaching technical diving classes. Scubatech, Inc. scubatech.com. I did shut down my video server and my web site when I retired.
Anyway, email management is not really a huge concern.
BTW- I've been having lots of fun now with shooting and editing 3D Spatial video with the iphone 15. Even got it working for display in my Meta Quest 3. No need for the expensive Apple Vision Pro. The iphone shoots some amazing quality in 3D.
Our definitions of spam are probably different. If it is coming from Amazon, it isn't spam -- just e-mail that you don't want to read. Amazon allows you to select what they send at some level and you may simply need to update that selection.
When I say spam, I'm thinking of truly unsolicited offers (travel is one of the worst classes) where your address has been "harvested" and is rumbling around in a master database of possible pigeons. Statistical spam filters are usually pretty good at detecting this kind of spam and adding IP blacklists (Spamhaus) to the scanner can often insure that most of that kind of junk mail gets tagged.
For people who just can't pass up an opportunity to give out their e-mail address in response to every phishing e-mail, Proofpoint was a godsend in my mail server administration. I still spent a lot of time unsubscribing my "clients" from mailing lists that they had signed up for and regretted but once I unsubscribed, that mail stopped.
My original "personal business" (shopping accounts, banking, investing) address has been active for 20 years now and the incidence of spam is around two per month. haveibeenpwnd shows that address as having been harvested a half dozen times from 2017 to 2020.
I've also implemented SPF, DMARC and DKIM to further insure that spoofed e-mails don't get through and, more importantly, that my domain names can't be used to send spam. My mail server hasn't been blacklisted for eight years now.
I long ago figured out that anything I can do on the front end to detect/deflect spam was going to take much less fuss on the back end wading through all of the junk. It also helped that I replaced all "mailto:" links on all of the company websites with something that couldn't be as easily harvested.
OK I get it about Amazon Spam. I do view the recommendations once in awhile.
I decided to try a couple "Unsubscribe" links and see if that works. I received over 600 in my inbox since 8 AM. The number one category of spam are the political donation solicitations. I'm sure I opened a can of spam back when I donated to a candidate years ago. Now I get spam from every candidate and every party. It's the largest category.
I decided to try a couple "Unsubscribe" links and see if that works. I received over 600 in my inbox since 8 AM. The number one category of spam are the political donation solicitations. I'm sure I opened a can of spam back when I donated to a candidate years ago. Now I get spam from every candidate and every party. It's the largest category.
