Win 7 pushed to an edge, it seems

While I haven't yet experienced this, there are credible reports that finance institutions - banks etc - are informing retail customers that as Win 7 is no longer supported (not quite true, of course), the customers will soon be unable to log into their banking accounts from a Win 7 PC. One must use Win 10/11, a current Mac or a current Linux distro for security.
I think this is sufficiently likely to gain momentum as to attract my attention. I greatly like Win 7, as it is exceedingly stable, well analysed such as in this forum and does not (never has) get in your face with forced "upgrades" that take over your PC without recourse and then proceed to wreck it. So, what to do ?
There are available some Win 10PE boot programs for flashdrive USB boot independent of an existing C:\ drive that provide a Win10 environment with included apps such as browsers. Useful but limited ... one such program known as the best of them still uses an older version of Opera. My own bank grumbled at this:"Upgrade your browser !" Nonetheless, this works as a temporary kludge.
Better I think is an internal dual boot with a freeware Linux distro such as Ubuntu. Short, sharp, easy enough to do with freeware tools such as MiniTool or Aomei Partition, needs about 70Gb of disk space . The dual boot option at turn-on time between Win 7 and Ubu is easily handled by freeware EasyBCD. Ubuntu and the like contain Firefox and Libre Office to handle the routine mess of bank account management. Boot-up time with Ubu is almost as quick as Win 7 and Ubu can "see" the C:\ drive and attached external drives as well as the home network. There is also a 5 year guarantee of support and security upgrades.
Last point. Macrium 8 (freeware) is able to image the internal Ubu partition to an external disk for backup and restore separated from the Win 7 partition. Not so for Aomei Backup. I've tested this. (Macrium cannot resize a Linux partition, but this can be done in Ubu). All of this is true of a dual boot Win10 as well of course, but without the costs and upgrade hassles.

Have you confirmed, from a credible source, that the claim is indeed true? To me, it looks like FUD without any real technical basis, much like what Microsoft did to trick people into downgrading to Windows 10.

The most important thing to look in those scare messages is the real meaning of "not supported".
It may mean that they simply no longer care to test on Windows 7, or that they know for a fact that it no longer runs in Win7. More often than not, it's the former. Or just a desire to move as many users as possible to a single OS/browser, for ease of support.

Consider that, for a website, it's pretty much impossible to know your operating system, the only hint they get is the user agent, and that's trivial to spoof. What's most relevant for them is your browser and its version.
A website owner (bank or otherwise) almost never even cares what's your OS, but they do care about your browser. Newer browser have newer features and sites can use them for ease of development, better experience and the like, and from time to time they'll bump the required version (knowing it or not). That doesn't impact your OS directly.

What do impact the OS is the browser support itself. As pages often demand newer browsers, the browser ultimately may decide to stop supporting Windows 7, by using an unsupported API or not caring about it any longer, or even though artificial limitations. Thus, when the website needs newer browsers, indirectly they may end up needing a newer OS.

We don't really know if that's really the case nowadays. Some day into the future, it will be, depending on how much features the banks uses and how well do browser vendors support Windows 7.

Now the important part, what to do?
If the restriction happens to be artificial, you can simply change your user agent and report any OS they like, and it'll work.
If there is a real need to update, update your browser first. And only consider a different OS if the needed browser no longer support your OS.
And always you can resort to dual-boot as you say, or even better use a virtual machine within your OS. That all failing, there will be a day when Win7 will no longer fit the bill and a new one will be needed.

My banks and credit card companies will complain about an old browser version, but none have complained yet about me using Win 7. When that day comes, though, I'll just login through my Win 10 VM.

I'm multi-booting several OSes (for no good reason anymore, but just because I can, since I have 9.5 TB of internal storage), but I almost never boot into the others. I find it more convenient to boot a linux, Win 8.1 or 10 VM from my Win 7 host whenever I need to. I'm a fan of VirtualBox, but others may have their favorites that work equally well.

(Some have occasionally questioned why I use a Win 7 host with 10 in a VM, rather than the other way around. IME, though, 7 has proven to be a lot more stable and reliable than 10, so I'm sticking with 7 as my base OS and will just run VMs when I can't do something in 7.)

@Alejandro85

Thanks for your reply.

A colleague of mine has shown me an email from his finance institution essentially telling him that all upgraded features in his internet account access will not be available to Win 7 because it is no longer secure (finance institution's words, not mine). Whether this finance group means it or not, the threat is sufficient to consider how to deal with it. My suggestion is one such response at no real cost. You will have noticed that my solution does not require Win 10/11, so if this is some MS scare tactic, it does MS no good. There are obviously solutions other than mine - I've just suggested one with no cost and little effort.

My colleague has upgraded his browser of course (trivial question).

Yes, unsupported API's (in Win 7) are common enough now that various programs won't run on Win 7. As far as we can tell (myself and colleague), this is what his finance group is saying in a roundabout way. I don't think the finance people are much interested in this for MS' benefit, but rather to reduce finance fraud, which costs them, by excluding spoofs from increasingly vulnerable O/S's.
@dg1261

Thanks for your reply.

VM's are another possible solution, of course. I've tried them and found the slower response within the virtual box replica an irritation I'd rather avoid. But my suggestion of a dual boot has its' own irritation in the need to reboot.

As it stands, Win 7 mostly works across the spectrum so far. When browsers, anti-virus programs etc discard it, then so be it. But if this threatens my bank account access, something has to be done to deal with it. Dual booting with Ubu (or Knoppix, or ...) is a costless "something" needing no real effort.

I know a sever you log into can tell which browser is being used, but can it tell the OS?

@riffwraith

Thank you for your reply.

The view my self and colleague formed from his email (saying an upgraded O/S was in order to keep access to his banking account) is that his finance group were rapidly heading to browsers that can't run in Win7, or at least with critical features that won't run. Not because they care about MS, we think, but because financial fraud costs them, so they will close any perceived loophole.

The impression I'm receiving from the replies here (admittedly a very small sample) is that this is an area most don't want to hear. Well, me neither - but this does seem to be coming with a gathering head of steam. So I looked for sensible solutions that were cost-free as much as possible and easy enough to implement.

riffwraith said:

I know a sever you log into can tell which browser is being used, but can it tell the OS?

A server should be able to parse that out of the HTTP_USER_AGENT environment variable that is passed from the client to the server when a HTTP request is made. But the variable can be faked by the browser, and there's no definitive standard (AFAIK) to how the variable is formatted anyway, so it's not necessarily foolproof. I can tell you, though, that the webservers hosting my own websites are able to give me a log each month with a breakdown of web traffic by visitor OS, and they get that from the HTTP_USER_AGENT variables. It does give me a pretty good idea of where my traffic is coming from, even if it's not totally accurate.

Beyond that, it's probably trivial for a website itself to use javascript to ferret out the OS, so it wouldn't surprise me if websites that have a vested interest in knowing (see below) were found to be doing that.

As Ian mentioned, though, the real end date is likely to be when the browsers stop supporting Win 7 -- and that's inevitably going to happen sooner or later. If a bank refuses to accept connections from an out-of-date browser but that browser cannot be updated because it no longer supports Win 7, you're kind of stuck in a Catch-22 situation, even if the bank doesn't directly block Win 7.

ian50 said:

Not because they care about MS, we think, but because financial fraud costs them, so they will close any perceived loophole.

My guess is it's not a fraud prevention issue, it's probably more likely a liability issue. The bank could open themselves up to greater liability in lawsuits if they knowingly allow customers to use unsupported versions of Windows.

There's a parallel issue with Quicken, Quickbooks, TurboTax, and Lacerte (Intuit's professional Tax Prep program). They still run fine on Win 7, but Intuit won't support them if you do. They don't want any extra liability exposure if the IRS comes after you, even if the OS isn't at fault.

@dg1261

"My guess is it's not a fraud prevention issue, it's probably more likely a liability issue"

Yes. We think from a bank's viewpoint, prevention is better than liability.

So I've devised a solution that seems to work around this with minimal effort and annoyance from me while maintaining Win7 as the main man, as it were.