That's the dumbest thing I've read in a long time. There's no such thing as completed security. All that means is it was uptodate with patched known security flaws till the date of the latest patch. Security is an endless cat and mouse chase. Any new security flaws, vulnerabilities coming out after they drop support will *not* be patched. It is only a matter of time till old OS's are an open book to any script kiddie out there.

I never seen a millionaire script kiddie, have you ? Double Dumbass.

Oh I do. That's why I don't use Chrome and its URL bar keylogger. Let me guess a web browser made by an advertising agency vs a Firefox that's had all its telemetry removed are "both the same for telemetry" (rolls eyes)...

Going through the entire Firefox about: list is not my idea of a fun weekend for the next 10yrs. just so I can say I removed all telemetry. Is there a more automated way ?

No, I actually mean the metadata, not just logs of your input. I mean how long you visited what part of a webpage, that stuff. Our website admin showed me all the info he can extract from someone visiting our site, it 's .... remarkable.
Once you have seen that, you can just smile at the "windows spyware".

Lack of security patches is both a valid concern but also gets way overblown often into the realms of hysterical paranoia (reaction to Spectre / Meltdown was absurd in the big picture of things. "Quick, quick we need to cripple performance and disable hyper-threading in gaming rigs and, and...").

The 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th most important PC security thing the end user can do are:-

- Not give out personal information to that nice man on the phone.
- Not reuse passwords across sites
- Enable 2FA
- Switch to a whitelist firewall (that stops anything phoning home)
- Change the default password on their router (this is what hackers will see long before they even attempt to hack a PC sitting behind it. Changing the password stops them changing the router's default DNS server to a compromised one that redirects to a cloned banking site with web address and security certificate all appearing "correct" in a web browser on any device that uses the router.
- Disable unnecessary services. Eg, if you use a computer on its own (not part of a LAN) then you don't need Server, SMB, SSDP Discovery, UPnP Device Host, etc, running or those SMB ports left wide open (as even W11 does by default). Consumers sure as hell don't need "authorized backdoors" like Remote Registry, Remote Desktop, Secondary Login, Windows Remote Management, etc, designed for corporations enabled and yet consumer W10-11 doesn't disable them by default...

OS updates are way down the list at best in 7th place and yet many people often over-focus on "OS updates = secure and that's that" to such an extent they often become complacent at getting the above basics right...

You mean a websites server logs that logs how long visitors stay on each page, their screen resolution, etc, for their own site? Well obviously. It's like saying "Did you know your phone company knows how many phone calls you make?" Yes, yes I did! They even bill me for it! That's not quite the same as someone who isn't your phone company demanding to know same information, nor has anything to do with what people dislike about W10 (usually telemetry on steroids + forced updates + the dumbing down of consumer Pro ability to disable stuff + forcing disabled stuff / uninstalled apps to reenable / reinstall after updates which drives some to disable all updates just for some sense of sanity / stability)...

... You are still complaining about Windows knowing what the others can find out about you? Seriously?
Ok, have fun then and live an illusion.

Given that's what the thread is ultimately about, yes "seriously". Just because it's 'normal' for anything and everything to want to monetize your data doesn't mean intentional over-sharing is a good thing.

1,2,3 won't prevent your computer being compromised and 4 and 6 are things an average person will rarely have done, while most people will update their OS somewhat regularly (if unwillingly on newer OS'es). OS updates are important because these are security improvements that will actually happen on a somewhat regular basis.

But yes, as I said before, serious security practices should be used if you use an unsupported OS, something the average person does not do, and most people (in the case of the latter few options you mentioned) simply don't have the knowhow to do.

This change by Steam is especially annoying because some games do not run on Win 10 but require Win 7 or older.
Well, I guess you could freeze (block updates) to an old version of steam, and then transfer games from one (1in 10) PC to another (win 7) PC via LAN. This would work until your steam version got corrupted. ( I did this when they updated form the Old Library to the New One in 2021.
I intend to dual-boot 7pro/10pro by the end of the year, or move to linux....

I tried using a whitelist firewall once, and it broke in the middle of launching a game. It was a nightmare and I couldn't add anything to the whitelist for about a year. (Yes, I didn't know what was broken, and I'd been stupid enough to install a firewall that didn't have an uninstaller at the time.) I couldn't join a multiplayer game, and only those things that had been previously allowed to connect could still connect. W8 (or, fwiw, 10, because most people skipped 8) brought native SSD support (7 lacks this, and only supports SSDs through a patch.)
10 brought DX12.
FWIW, 2 tech friends of mine STRONGLY recommend "Blackbird" because "it defeats win 10's telemetry"

You don't whitelist games but websites, aka surfing. You DMZ a port for the server you play on. Or DMZ a general game port and force all games to use the same.

Uhm, no, I just plugged in an SSD to my Win 7 machine and it recognized it as a storage device.
Unless you had Win 7 home or beta, not sure which one was incomplete anymore. I ran Win 7 Pro from get go.

I had comodo firewall, booted a game, and it minimized the game to ask "can this program connect to the net" it did this with every single program that wanted to connect, until i set it to "guess for yourself and don't bother me anymore". Well, one time i had to cram down my PC because it hung. it was never the same after that.

And I was thinking of NVMe drives. You have to slipstream something into them to get 7 to recognize them.
https://winraid.level1techs.com/t/guide-how-to-get-win7-clean-installed-onto-an-nvme-ssd/33363
I'm also on 7 Pro out-of-the-box

I forgot to comment on a couple of things in my previous post in this thread, including this quoted statement: To install any game on Steam, you literally have to agree to a "Subscriber Agreement" first, which is proof that all you actually bought from Steam was a subscription, and nothing more, which lets you rent your games from them so long as you comply with whatever terms of the rental they feel like imposing.

GOG may be a bit better in that it doesn't have a "Subscriber Agreement," but the EULAs on GOG games are probably not much better than Steam's "Subscriber Agreement" is (and some of GOG's games EULA's even require the customer to agree to let the game install spyware on their system, including the most recent Pathfinder game which has been the #1 top seller on GOG for much of this week).

So the OP's connotation that GOG is a rosey paradise compared to Steam is not super accurate IMO.

As for wanting GOG Galaxy to continue to support Windows 7 & 8: I expect GOG wouldn't go out of their way to break compatibility, and they also won't go out of their to maintain compatibility either. Chances are Windows 7 will stop working with Galaxy eventually.

And I'm also confused about why the OP wants reassurances that dropping support won't be "around the corner," thus implying he's okay with them dropping support at a later date. If that is so, then why not just upgrade your OS now, since you are going to concede to doing it later on anyway?

I am Pretty confused here. The Official requirements for Galaxy 2.0 are:

-Windows 8 or newer with the latest system updates.
-Mac OS 10.15 or newer with the latest system updates.

So I understand that Windows 7 wasn't officially supported since the beginning. It can could run, though.