Usability and security are really important topics. Here I describe what I've done about them and, in particular, why I'm considering depending Windows 7 Profe

Usability and security are really important topics. Here I describe what I've done about them and, in particular, why I'm considering depending Windows 7 Professional for a lot more. Recently I've spent many hours using Windows 7 on one computer and Windows 10 on another. So far, I prefer Windows 7. For the difference in "usability", maybe you mean the changes and/or additions since Windows 7. To me it seems that there are some people at Microsoft who have a vision of user interface, user experience, usability they want and want Windows to move to that. The early, seed example of their vision is the GUI, graphical user interface, but I am guessing they want to move to hand gestures, eyeball tracking, special 3D goggles, lots of inferencing to guess, anticipate what a user wants, etc. Some people can really like that vision, especially if it is done well, but that seems difficult. For some parts of computing, versions of such a vision might be the right things to pursue. For me, for a computer I would use, I don't want the vision. The changes I saw from Windows 7 to Windows 10 seem to be part of the vision, and, whatever they are, I don't like them. One big issue is, I don't know what all the changes are: Apparently I'm supposed just to discover the changes. Well, maybe I've discovered less than half of the changes. Some of the changes I really hate: E.g., with Windows 10 too often suddenly all the open windows disappear! And too often I'm trying to work quickly, by accident hit some strange key combinations, and suddenly big, goofy things happen. For me, personally, my main used of a computer are just (a) typing text, (b) Web browsing, (c) watching movies on DVDs, (d) occasionally printing some letters or addressing envelopes. So, my most heavily used program is the one I use for nearly all my typing, my favorite text editor, Kedit -- right, trying Emacs is on my TODO list. Otherwise, I use Firefox and Chrome for Web browsing and VLC or PowerDVD for movies (or music CDs). Otherwise my favorite part of Windows is the hierarchical file system NTFS (new technology file system), and to help me use that I use the scripting language Rexx, have written a lot of macros, and have written a simple shell (runs in console windows and gets my typing and does the right things with it). Windows 10, 7 and maybe even still XP and 2000 are all plenty good at all of that. So, point: For me, personally, for the parts of Windows 7 I use, usability is fine; I don't want to be bothered with changes; in Windows 10 I'd welcome a big OFF switch so that I could get rid of the results of the vision. For me, my car is not my destination and is just a tool I use to get to some destinations. For my personal usage, my computer is not my destination but just a tool. For me, the goals of the vision make bad tools. I should insert: For me, often GUIs are inefficient because it is tough to script such programs, that is, run one of them 200,000 times to automate some work. For the rest of my interest in "usability": I'm trying to do an Internet startup, that is, a Web site. For that I've done some programming, appear to have the code working as intended, but no doubt will need to do more. And I will need to handle some dozens of terabytes of data. I settled on Visual Basic .NET for the programming language, ASP.NET for the Web pages, ADO.NET and SQL Server for the data base. For .NET, it looks quite capable. Also, Microsoft seems to be taking it very seriously, and a lot of important work is being done with it. So, it seem like a good choice for my startup. Visual Basic .NET (VB)? It appears to be a perfectly good way to get to the .NET framework and the CLR (common language runtime). C# seems to have borrowed some of the C syntax that, as I recall from Kernighan and Ritchie, was deliberately idiosyncratic. To me, the VB syntax is more traditional, more like Basic, Fortran, Algol, PL/I, Pascal, etc. and is easier to teach, learn, read, and write and less error prone. My understanding is that the semantics of VB and C# are (or long were) essentially the same, and that there is a program to translate from either one to the other. So, the difference is syntactic sugar. For .NET? I welcome the work on managed code, garbage collection (management of dynamic memory allocation and freeing), etc. If managed code is a little slower than C, C++, or assembler, fine with me: Current processors with 8, 10, 16, etc. cores and clock speeds 4+ GHz seem plenty up to running managed code for the Web site of my startup. And for servers processors with, what, 256 cores are coming? For the last time I checked ad rates, a day my Web site with a 4.0 GHz 8 core processor gets busy should be a good day for my bank account. For Visual Studio, once I tried it for about an hour, could make no sense out of it, and never tried it again. I type my code into Kedit. So far, it's worked fine. Then I wrote a few little macros that make Kedit work even better. Happy camper time. I know; likely Emacs could be still better. For my business, writing and running .NET code as above is the "usability" I want. If Microsoft wants some improvements, then okay: (1) Copying files for backup: Robocopy seems to work, and it is what I use. Getting all the options set took a while. The log file it writes is ugly, and I can't make any sense out of a lot of it. To me, XCOPY has some serious problems with how it handles dates and times. For Microsoft's "Windows 7 backup", for Acronis, etc., I can make little or no sense out of them. So, for a step forward, I'd like a better backup program. Right, no vision thing. No GUI. Command line only. Excellent design. Good documentation. (2) List of the names in a file system directory tree. Commands DIR and ATTRIB are ways to get a good list. I have a command SUBDIR from Rexx that is my favorite. But a better program would be welcome. Right, no vision thing. No GUI. Command line only. Excellent design. Good documentation. (3) Check two files for equality. I just want to see if two files are equal or not. Don't assume anything about the contents of the files -- don't assume that they are lines of text, from Office Word, etc. Don't try to find all the places the two files are different or the same. So, COMP is the wrong tool. And FC can't handle legal file tree names. So need a program that will compare two files for being equal, yes or no, and with the output only the first byte where they are not equal. Right, no vision thing. No GUI. Command line only. Excellent design. Good documentation. I wrote my own using Rexx and its function Charin. Now for the important topic of security: Some months ago I did download that last update for Windows 7 Professional. Then I noticed that apparently that update also is for the corresponding edition of Windows Server, apparently 2008. Uh, I should interject here: In my startup, I will need some simple, routine, lightly used file sharing among a few computers. From my information gathering, I conclude that such file sharing will be a lot easier with Windows 7 Professional than with any version of Windows Server. So, at least for the early months of my startup going live, it appears that it will be easier to use Windows 7 Professional than Windows Server. So, I begin to conclude that with that last update Windows 7 Professional is as secure as Windows Server 2008. Then I have to assume that for some years many of the most important companies in the world ran fine on Windows Server 2008. Gathering information for my planning for the first months of going live with my Web site, I learned (1) For updates, e.g., for security, Microsoft seems to be cooperating with customers who are still using versions of Windows Server that go way back, to 2008 and before. (2) Microsoft has announced that they will continue to have security updates for Windows Professional into 2023. So, from my need to make decisions based on limited information, I'm concluding that: (a) Basically Windows, just the (apparently at most slowly changing) operating system itself is and has for 10+ years been quite, maybe rock solidly, secure. Maybe the US NSA (National Security Agency, the main US organization for communications security) knows better, but as just a startup entrepreneur I'm f'getting about such things. Sure, some hacker in North Korea might send goofy UDP packets at my IP address, but Microsoft needed to have Windows Server 2008 protect against those packets already 10+ years ago. So, let the goofy packets come; Windows should throw them into the trash bit bucket. If there really is a DoS (denial of service) attack or some such, maybe I should call CloudFlare. (b) The security problems Windows 10, 11, etc. struggle with are caused not by Windows itself but by some of the common applications, maybe Web browsers, browser add ons, various programs distributed as EXE files, and some actions of careless users. Point: Using Windows 7 Professional for my personal computing, startup software development, and startup Web servers seems fine with no worries about usability or security.