VBProject: In another anti-consumer move, Steam drops support for the last PC-based offline stable great OS next year. All your purchased games that were released 10-20 years ago and work fine on XP (let alone 7) are now won't be playable on 7 without some community bypasses.
BrianSim: I don't use W7, however it does highlight the potential absurdity of where will we may be in 10 years time -
"In order to download your DRM-Free games you need to use our client that only runs on Windows 365. Subscribe now to get your DRM-Free games today!" (Meanwhile, the pirates will continue to have no such OS version restrictions...) Probably not an issue for most Steam users, but GOG might want to stop and think about the obvious contradiction there if they head down that route in being a little too restrictive (that benefits Microsoft far more than it does GOG).
SitcomAntibody: Honestly, you shouldn't have Windows 7 connected to net. It's a security risk since there are no more official security updates being made.
BrianSim: In my experience that's mostly overblown for domestic users. In fact whenever someone boasts how "secure" they are for running Windows 10-11 vs Windows 7-8, the first thing I ask is
"Did you change your Windows firewall to whitelist (block by default, allow by exception) plus disable all the back-door services like Remote Desktop, Remote Registry, Windows Remote Management, etc? Or are you still running W10-11 in default configuration where the OS will happily allow any and all malware to 'phone home' by default?"... Someone on W7 with a whitelist based firewall plus all the "official backdoor services" closed is already 100x more secure than the default W10 configuration is in practise.
Except you are forgetting one thing.
Every time you load a website, your computer downloads and then runs a script (Javascript). If that script is malicious and your browser is out of date, it could "pwn" your system and you wouldn't even know it. Sure, you can block scripts. But if you do, a ton of websites will simply stop working these days.
Also, lest we forget when you download games or applications to your computer, which could also carry something nasty.
Besides, it's not your security I'm concerned so much about, but rather it's when your computer gets infected and silently joins a botnet and starts being used to attack peoples servers and send spam, it's a royal pain in the butt.
