I want to use win7 "forever" and never upgrade to win10

feetand nches · 09 Mar 2019

Someone should really come out with a Windows 7 Clone and sell it to the OEM's, but then would be sued by MS I guess. Why MS don't do this is beyond me.

lehnerus2000 · 14 Mar 2019

Fantail said:

Leaning towards keeping 7 and dual booting with Linux Mint.

I don't see any problem with that.

My main PC has W7 & Linux Mint 19.1 MATE installed on it.

My "media" PC has XP, W7 & Linux Mint 18.2 MATE installed on it.
Unfortunately I stuck a spare 3TB HDD in it, so XP refuses to boot (BSOD).

RoWin7 · 14 Mar 2019

I wonder if you could put in 2 HDs, and make some kind of switch for the PSU. or just manually switch the connector from one HD to the other.

I have no experience with Linux. Can it detect the same data files as Windows? Mine are on a partition D.

Megahertz07 · 15 Mar 2019

Yes, Linux has almost all Windows equivalent programs so you will be able to open MS Office files in a Windows drive (NTFS or FAT32 or exfat)

Although Linux is a great OS, it looks and works different from Windows.
If you only have one Legacy - MBR drive it will change the MBR to take the boot sequence to Grub (Linux boot loader).
Grub will have a option to boot Linux or Windows.

The problems begin if you want to uninstall Linux. Then you will have to restore the MBR to boot Windows.

So my advice is to disconnect the Windows drive andd install Linux on a different drive. Then during POST you launch the Boot menu and choose the OS you want to boot from.

RoWin7 · 15 Mar 2019

I use Open Office, but it can produce docs if needed. And thousands of jpgs, gifs, mp3. My computer club has Linux workshops too, but I would need to retain Windows for online work. I see a lot of people using Mint. Why is that preferable over other Linux OS's? Or does each one supersede the one before, in a manner similar to Windows?