Reverting to older version - UPDATED

[marcL]

2 hours ago, Lord Tim said:

I have to say, though, as painful as that first week was

One week only? Lucky guy!

My last system set up (2019) took about 1 month until most of the plugins and other software was properly working! Most trouble was caused by the motley authorization and installation ideas by many developers! It took some time to find out how to do it! How I was glad about all those plugin providers that had  a simple offline authorization (none, file, key or registry) or the ones that had iLok! But many of the others with machine dependency were a nightmare!

The same thing with the installation: The worst are those like NI that require to re-download a lot of the stuff (the cool installation managers)! NI alone took quite some time!

That is also the reason why I push the W10 update of my recording pc along. It runs fine with W7. Why to fix something that isn't broken?

[Lord Tim]

... until it is. Win7 is getting supported less and less by developers all the time. That said, I'm currently seeing no big rush to move to Win11 on any of my work machines at the moment - it works fine on all of the machines I'm running it on but really doesn't add much to what I do, but come EOL for Win10, that's a good time to upgrade then because you know it'll be the OS that's getting the most attention in testing and will likely be the best choice to use on hardware of that era.

I know your feelings on Win7 / online services so I won't argue here, everyone should do what works for them

[Starship Krupa]

I definitely understand “if it ain’t broke,” but the truth of the matter is that there is a tradeoff.

The longer you wait, the more painful the transition will be, and the greater the likelihood of running into trouble, and the greater the potential of that trouble will be annoying.

Windows 10 has been around long enough that it’s clear that it’s a safe upgrade from 7. And I have found that in every case, even the aforementioned Core 2 system with 4G of RAM, 10 ran better. Of course it was initially on the despised Vista, but Vista wasn’t all that different from 7 once they ironed out the issues.

Cakewalk itself is no longer tested on or guaranteed to work with Windows 7. When the devs announced that years ago, that was my tipping point.

There are many hidden benefits to doing a new system build. Not insignificant, you’ll weed out a TON of software you’re not using. I posted a topic in the Computer Systems sub about doing a new build and what I ran into, good and bad.

One thing to be aware of is that Windows 10, when first installed, takes about 24 hours to settle down. Somehow it analyzes your system and fine tunes itself. There’s a lot of communication with Microsoft’s servers. So if you do anything heavy with it in the first day or so, it may look like performance is degraded.

Yeah, machine-dependent authorizations are a pain in the cases where you must contact the manufacturer once you get past a certain number of authorizations. Plugin Alliance has a good system, all you have to do is go to their website and deauthorize your previous system. WA Production is one of the ones you must contact after you run out of authorizations.

[msmcleod]

On 2/27/2023 at 3:11 AM, Starship Krupa said:

Windows 10 has been around long enough that it’s clear that it’s a safe upgrade from 7. And I have found that in every case, even the aforementioned Core 2 system with 4G of RAM, 10 ran better. Of course it was initially on the despised Vista, but Vista wasn’t all that different from 7 once they ironed out the issues.

+1 to this.

Apart from the nightmare upgrading to 2020H1, Windows 10 has been a dream for me... and the refusal to upgrade to 2020H1 ended up being 3rd party drivers: one of them a Korg driver, the other a Native Instruments ISO reader driver that was no longer used/required.

Funny you should mention a Core 2 system with 4GB RAM - I've got a dual boot Vostro 1700 Core Duo (2.2Ghz, 4GB RAM).  One boot is Windows 10 64 bit, the other Windows 7 32 bit. 

I use the Windows 7 32 bit with my Yamaha 01X because it's rock solid, but I'm tied to using SONAR Platinum 32 bit.  Windows 10 in general works marginally better, but the Yamaha MLAN drivers require Windows to be run in test mode and BSOD every time it shuts down... not a huge hassle for Windows 10, but the Windows 7 boot then insists on a full chkdsk on ALL drives on reboot.

IMO the only reason to stay on Windows 7 is drivers and/or old applications.  I've got a Windows 7 32 bit boot on my DAW PC simply to support my DS2416 cards and older 16 bit software (old patch editor software).  My Windows 7 64 bit boot is pretty much never used now, apart from doing a quick smoke test on new CbB builds.

Windows 7 is slowly becoming unusable.  Many websites have updated security that older Chrome/The Edge/IE versions won't support.  Firefox seems to be the only browser that continues to update on Windows 7, but who knows for how much longer.

As far as CbB is concerned, Windows 7 does work still, but it may not in the future.