Microsoft is warning (reminiding) its Windows 10 users that the Windows
10 EOL is approaching. Given Microsoft's past behavior and that it is
a commercial business, has it made any comments that it will terminate
the Windows 10 O/S software after the last EOL security update? These
days I just don't trust MS to not want to force people using Windows 10
to migrate to a new version whether said user wants to do so or not.

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On 6/6/2024 1:25 PM, John wrote:

Microsoft is warning (reminiding) its Windows 10 users that the Windows
10 EOL is approaching. Given Microsoft's past behavior and that it is
a commercial business, has it made any comments that it will terminate
the Windows 10 O/S software after the last EOL security update? These
days I just don't trust MS to not want to force people using Windows 10
to migrate to a new version whether said user wants to do so or not.

MS have never remotely disabled Windows computers before.
But just for the sake of your own sanity you might consider
getting a firewall (Simplewall seems good) and disabling all
possible notifications. MS could make your life miserable with
warnings and salespitches if you don't block them out of your
system. It's beyond me why anyone puts up with the ads and
popups.

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On 6/6/2024 1:25 PM, John wrote:

Microsoft is warning (reminiding) its Windows 10 users that the Windows
10 EOL is approaching. Given Microsoft's past behavior and that it is
a commercial business, has it made any comments that it will terminate
the Windows 10 O/S software after the last EOL security update? These
days I just don't trust MS to not want to force people using Windows 10
to migrate to a new version whether said user wants to do so or not.

No.

My Win7 and Win8.1 drives still work.
My W10 drive (not going to receive any more Version Upgrades now) is also going to work.

The purpose of any Marketing Effort, is to use FUD (Fear Uncertainty Doubt)
to encourage you to spend more money. Whether you do, would depend on
whether the new offering has something the old (unsupported) offering
no longer has.

At this point in time (June 2024), we don't have truly competitive hardware offerings from the players. Only one product is being touted. Recent
slideware implies competition will eventually show up, and I would wait
until the dust has settled before buying hardware to support anything new.

On a comedy note, yesterday on Toms, one of the reviewers gets
an NPU top hat for an RPi 5. What was the problem for the reviewer ?
No software. And that's how it goes in a gold rush. You get
to the gold mining site, and realize you left all the shovels behind.

Paul

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John <invalid@invalid.net> wrote:

Microsoft is warning (reminiding) its Windows 10 users that the Windows
10 EOL is approaching. Given Microsoft's past behavior and that it is
a commercial business, has it made any comments that it will terminate
the Windows 10 O/S software after the last EOL security update? These
days I just don't trust MS to not want to force people using Windows 10
to migrate to a new version whether said user wants to do so or not.

When have you EVER seen Windows get disabled or self-destruct when its
support ended? Or MS-DOS? Or MS Office? Or when has any MS product self-destructed when support gets discontinued? Not supported has
nothing to do be continued usability. Discontinued support means the
owner no longer updates, not that they send out a self-destruct signal.

Products and services are separate beasts. Microsoft could yank away
their e-mail, OneDrive, and other online services. If they yanked away
MS accounts, you'd have to create a new local/offline account in Windows
since you no longer have an MS account to log into.

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Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> wrote:

The purpose of any Marketing Effort, is to use FUD (Fear Uncertainty
Doubt) to encourage you to spend more money. Whether you do, would
depend on whether the new offering has something the old
(unsupported) offering no longer has.

I remember when Microsoft starting pushing its users to change from
Hotmail to Outlook.com. They made it sound like you had to switch
domains. The even provided a toggle button to auto migrate from Hotmail
to the Outlook.com domain. It was NOT a requirement. When I saw the
prompts, I kept my Hotmail.com account, AND also created a new but a
separate account on the Outlook.com domain.

My Hotmail account got grandfathered with the 25 GB storage quota it had originally. Microsoft dropped the quota to 5 GB unless you logged into
your account, and by using their webmail client, not by using a local
e-mail client. However, new accounts, like the new one I created at Outlook.com, or Hotmail accounts you didn't get grandfathered by signing
in using their webmail client with 15 days of the notice, got stuck with
the new lowered 5 GB quota. Gmail starts with 15 GB for new accounts,
and kept it even after Microsoft dropped from 15 GB to 5 GB.

I know a lot of friends and family that got conned by Microsoft when
they were misled into believing they must migrate from Hotmail.com to Outlook.com. They didn't get another account. Their Hotmail account
converted into an Outlook.com account. Both Hotmail and Outlook.com
logins go through login.live.com. Yep, Hotmail, Live.com, and
Outlook.com are all the same service. I never had a Live.com account to
know if Microsoft misled those users into moving to Outlook.com.

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On Thu, 6 Jun 2024 16:09:27 -0400, Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> wrote:

The purpose of any Marketing Effort, is to use FUD (Fear Uncertainty Doubt) >to encourage you to spend more money. Whether you do, would depend on
whether the new offering has something the old (unsupported) offering
no longer has.

And whether the old unsupported offering has something that the new
supported version no longer has -- in my case, the ability to run
older programs that run under MS-DOS.


--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
Web: http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
Blog: http://khanya.wordpress.com
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk

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winston <winstonmvp@gmail.com> wrote:

The toggle button was to migrate the device from one backend server to
the newer Exchange server which supported the prior Exchange Active
Sync(old server) and additionally Exchange.

Although it was announced maybe a year ago, Microsoft caught up to my
account to remove EWS (Exchange Web Services) access. I had to delete
my current Exchange-capable account in my local e-mail client to using
IMAP to regain access.

I forgot about the msn.com domain. I never had one.

***Note:*** - the size reduction(15 to 5 GB) did not impact M365
Office subscriptions(365 Family has 1TB for the primary subscription
owner and 1TB for each shared MSA with up to 5 shares allowed; Personal(single user subscription) 365 has 1TB for that single owner
user.

With MS 365 (aka MS Office 365), yep, you get 1 TB for storage quota,
and the means to up to 6 TB (but, as I recall, it wasn't contiguous
storage, but kept separate, unless you used a local storage consolidator
app to effectively merge them, but there was still the 1 TB boundaries).
When I subscribed to MS Office 365, I got the 1 TB, but never used much
of it. When I dumped the subscriptionware after 5 years, I dropped back
to the 15 GB quota of which I'm only using 1.4 GB. Consumption doesn't
change much over the years. I only put a few zipped folders up there.
Most of my backups are on internal HDDs, and copied to external USB
HDDs, with some data on USB flash drives (that rarely get written, and
mostly for reading during restores).

The backend server changed, no Hotmail.com accounts were converted to Outlook.com accounts...the domain didn't change. The only things that changed was the backend server, all MSA(Outlook.com, Live.com,
Hotmail.com and MSn.com and 3rd party registered retained the domain
name, and all logon to the web mail UI - which now goes to:
https://outlook.live.com)

But when you converted your Hotmail account to an Outlook.com account,
you no longer had the Hotmail account (er, domain). Once you moved, and
didn't move back within somewhere around 15 days, you were stuck with Outlook.com.

Confusing, always!!!! :)

Microsoft continually confuses with their rebranding. Mail app became
new Outlook (and "new" was part of the product name). Lots of users
confused Outlook Express (which came from MS Internet Mail and News
hence the msimn.exe for its executable filename) with Outlook. Many
users pushed to the Outlook.com domain just called it Outlook, so hard
to know just what they're asking about. Microsoft keeps moving stuff
under a larger umbrella. I'm suprised they haven't yet rebranded Azure
to Outlook.

Sometimes I think Marketing folks just make work to qualify their pay.

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On 6/6/2024 11:16 PM, Steve Hayes wrote:

On Thu, 6 Jun 2024 16:09:27 -0400, Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> wrote:

The purpose of any Marketing Effort, is to use FUD (Fear Uncertainty Doubt) >> to encourage you to spend more money. Whether you do, would depend on
whether the new offering has something the old (unsupported) offering
no longer has.

And whether the old unsupported offering has something that the new
supported version no longer has -- in my case, the ability to run
older programs that run under MS-DOS.

Yes, Win10 would be the last 32-bit support.

You could not do an Upgrade Install of Win11 x64 over top of a Win10 x86 (32bit).
I don't think that would work, and it might not even start to upgrade
when it detects the details.

There may be some amount of surplus equipment at the end of the
Win10 era (Oct 2025) and maybe you can get a machine suited to your
archival activity at that time.

I was looking on Ebay, and my laptop model was for sale for $50.
That's what I mean by "end-of-era" computers.

While VirtualBox allows running older stuff, one thing to be
aware of, is the "tested support" is not as extensive as it once was.
At one time, VirtualBox would be advertised as supporting MSDOS.
You would not have that "promise" today. They might test today,
that the most recent version runs Windows 10. They don't spend time
testing that Win2K still works. And because Win2K tends to break anyway
on VBox, then you definitely would want them to
test that OS for you. Saving you the trouble of it railing on
one core.

While virtualization is interesting, the support of it is less
interesting :-) They tweak some of the OSes to make them work.
When they say they no longer support an OS, then any existing
tweaks might not get tested.

I would say, the best option for you, would be to acquire
additional equipment, to preserve the capability you want.
Dodgy workarounds just aren't worth it, to someone who has
work to do.

Paul

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On Fri, 7 Jun 2024 00:53:50 -0400, Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> wrote:

On 6/6/2024 11:16 PM, Steve Hayes wrote:

On Thu, 6 Jun 2024 16:09:27 -0400, Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> wrote:

The purpose of any Marketing Effort, is to use FUD (Fear Uncertainty Doubt) >>> to encourage you to spend more money. Whether you do, would depend on
whether the new offering has something the old (unsupported) offering
no longer has.

And whether the old unsupported offering has something that the new
supported version no longer has -- in my case, the ability to run
older programs that run under MS-DOS.

Yes, Win10 would be the last 32-bit support.

You could not do an Upgrade Install of Win11 x64 over top of a Win10 x86 (32bit).
I don't think that would work, and it might not even start to upgrade
when it detects the details.

There may be some amount of surplus equipment at the end of the
Win10 era (Oct 2025) and maybe you can get a machine suited to your
archival activity at that time.

Yes, I did that.

When my Win 7 laptop was stolen last year I asked around for a 32-bit
Windows laptop to replace it, and one 2nd-hand dealer had a Dell
laptop with no OS. They installed 32-bit Win 10 on it.

To get it to do what the Win 7 one did I still have to do a lot of
setting up -- for example, how does one set environment variables,
especially PATH?

But my concern is much wider -- for 20-30 years academic institutions, libraries and others have been collecting reseachdata data that they
have stored on computers which will soon become inaccessible. People
still lament tghemicrosft is doing the same thing right not.

People need to remember:

DIGITIZING DATA DESTROYS DATA

I was looking on Ebay, and my laptop model was for sale for $50.
That's what I mean by "end-of-era" computers.

While VirtualBox allows running older stuff, one thing to be
aware of, is the "tested support" is not as extensive as it once was.
At one time, VirtualBox would be advertised as supporting MSDOS.
You would not have that "promise" today. They might test today,
that the most recent version runs Windows 10. They don't spend time
testing that Win2K still works. And because Win2K tends to break anyway
on VBox, then you definitely would want them to
test that OS for you. Saving you the trouble of it railing on
one core.

While virtualization is interesting, the support of it is less
interesting :-) They tweak some of the OSes to make them work.
When they say they no longer support an OS, then any existing
tweaks might not get tested.

Yes.

I lament the death of OS/2, which could emulate MS-DOS and Windows
seamlessly. Its emulators were as good as the originals. But the
add-ons one gets today don't seem so good.


--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
Web: http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
Blog: http://khanya.wordpress.com
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk

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On Sat, 8 Jun 2024 01:23:51 -0400, Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> wrote:

On 6/7/2024 11:44 PM, Steve Hayes wrote:

To get it to do what the Win 7 one did I still have to do a lot of
setting up -- for example, how does one set environment variables,
especially PATH?

Start : Run : sysdm.cpl [ Direct path to "System" Control Panel ]

Advanced tab (in the middle)

Environment Variables (bottom right)

System variables, PATH (it seems some of my custom entries are there, like Ghostscript path)

It's been about the same since at least XP.

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On 6/7/2024 11:44 PM, Steve Hayes wrote:

To get it to do what the Win 7 one did I still have to do a lot of
setting up -- for example, how does one set environment variables,
especially PATH?

Start : Run : sysdm.cpl [ Direct path to "System" Control Panel ]

Advanced tab (in the middle)

Environment Variables (bottom right)

System variables, PATH (it seems some of my custom entries are there, like Ghostscript path)

Paul

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On Sat, 8 Jun 2024 01:23:51 -0400, Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> wrote:

On 6/7/2024 11:44 PM, Steve Hayes wrote:

To get it to do what the Win 7 one did I still have to do a lot of
setting up -- for example, how does one set environment variables,
especially PATH?

Start : Run : sysdm.cpl [ Direct path to "System" Control Panel ]

Advanced tab (in the middle)

Environment Variables (bottom right)

System variables, PATH (it seems some of my custom entries are there, like Ghostscript path)

Thanks very much!


--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
Web: http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
Blog: http://khanya.wordpress.com
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk

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John wrote:

Microsoft is warning (reminiding) its Windows 10 users that the Windows
10 EOL is approaching. Given Microsoft's past behavior and that it is
a commercial business, has it made any comments that it will terminate
the Windows 10 O/S software after the last EOL security update? These
days I just don't trust MS to not want to force people using Windows 10
to migrate to a new version whether said user wants to do so or not.

I don't think that will happen. If they did that, it would trigger a
massive exodus away from Windows.

--
John C.

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