Win7, Linux Mint and VMWare on same machine ?

@lehnerus2000

I got sick of having to spend hours fixing W10 after updating/upgrading.
Now I keep my W10 Home and W10 Pro VM disconnected from our network.
Its the only way to be sure W10 can't send Telemetry, or download dodgy drivers/updates/upgrades.

Yes, it's just so rude. The 1st time this hit an unsuspecting, naive me, suddenly my (?) machine that I had struggled and struggled with just to get a readable font, displayed a blank screen with that irritating little wheel revolving forever and an admonition not to turn my machine off. I finally twigged it was MS taking over and I was reminded of the 1984 film where the TV screen was suddenly filled with Big Brother watching you. And I thought Orwell wrote 1984 as a satire, not a manual. Silly me, eh ?

But disconnecting Win10 from the net, although it stops MS beating up on you, destroys the single most useful advance in computing since the advent of the PC for home use in the early '80s. The largest, most accessible and affordable library in the world ever to emerge - and we cannot take advantage of it ?

Yes, I make monthly backup restore images in any case, now using Macrium 7 Free. I had used Acronis for years until they fell over and I found the MS Win7 version not as useful since you can't mount the image to retrieve single files.

The deployment of a Macrium Win7 image into a VM hosted in Linux remains the most promising.

Alejandro85 said:

The fact that Microsoft decided to pull "support" means ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to the user and the working of the system. And considering Windows has not seen a major update since Vista, it seems Win7 has still a lot of life remaining.

ABSOLUTELY NOTHING? The inability of the user to get Windows 7 security patches is something the user should at least think about.