For anyone still working with this,…buy another because you become vulnerable to hacks,…
,…you have until January 10th
Hopefully this information is of no use to anyone…But there are quite a few with old windows apparently…
And if this is nonsense Dutch news I hope this topic will be removed, … but it used to be a big thing here. it’s been on the news for a while now…
Greetings,Rogier
Does anyone really still use this OS?
Hi Stuart,
This is one of the few questions I can answer on this subject…Yes,…and anyone who doesn’t follow the news ,…and like me has no interest in this kind of thing, but doesn’t have a smarter wife (She takes care of the computer stuff here),…for those people I hope this message helps,… 
Greetings,…
It’s on Microsoft’s site, January 10th 2023 and after that it’s unsupported. It will of course continue to work but it’s only a matter of time until security holes become a problem.
To answer the other question, of course people still use it. Windows 10 wasn’t launched until the middle of 2015 and you can bet Windows 8 devices were still being sold well after that. Not everyone can afford to buy new devices every few years, or perhaps can afford to but don’t see the point if they’re only browsing the web and doing email etc. There’s also plenty of people that if you asked what OS they ran, they might just about know it was Windows but would have no clue about the version (get yourself a tech support job for a few days if you don’t believe me).
Yes, just like there are people who still use even older OSs. Why not? If it does what you want it to do then why be forced to upgrade? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
All OSs, including the one you use yourself right now, have issues that can potentially be exploited. But we don’t see news reports of billions of people falling victim to hackers every day, do we? Why? Because it’s far easier for these unscrupulous individuals to target people via other means en masse, rather than waste their time searching for tiny vulnerabilities that may or may not be any good to them, and may only work on an individual basis.
The fact is that the majority of the “security hole” stuff is little more than scare stories to sell the latest products with their so-called security enhancements. Most issues are found by dedicated security teams which then sell this information back to the developer so they can fix it… not by criminals with the ability to actually find and use the issue to their advantage.
Even the ones that do would not be bothering to target Win8 users. It makes no financial sense whatsoever to target an OS that is barely used by anybody… it’s less than 3% of the current Windows market. Even Win7 has more current users. Criminals target the group that makes sense… the Win10 market, which accounts for about 70% of Windows users right now.
I used WinME, WinXP, and Win7 loooooooong after the end of their official support and had no issues whatsoever. I intend to do the same with Win10 because by the time it’s support ends no criminal will be bothering with it anyway.
Criminals will use whatever has the easiest exploits and when they get published for Win10 and Win11 it advertises they are open to be exploited on older systems. 3% of all Windows machines is still millions of PCs. It’s dangerous advice to give to suggest that it’s safe to keep using OS’es after they go out of support, particularly when not all of your audience will be tech savvy
Sorry, but I totally disagree with you, as does the evidence. Plenty of people on OSs older than Win8 have never had any issues whatsoever with criminals and hackers. Even businesses continue using older systems if upgrading would be too costly, and they don’t suffer constant attacks either.
We live in a world in which we’re made to be petrified of everything, and most of the time it’s a situation created and exploited by business to sell us more crap we don’t need. If you want to buy into that then you go right ahead… I gave no advice, just my opinion on the situation. I said what I have done and intend to do, not what I think everyone else should do. If people want to live terrified and waste money, that’s up to them. Makes no difference to me.
I would have thought that most businesses use the oldest supported operating system until it becomes unsupported as its been tried and trusted. So when windows 8 becomes unsupported they will migrate to windows 10 rather than windows 11. The cost would be offset from the corporation tax under the annual investment allowance.
Uhg…windows… Chucked it all out years ago… been running on linux ever since.
Which doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its specific problems, but i’m better of since then…
Probably true. But the cost of the OS is just one factor. Others are the hardware upgrades, upgrading the other systems which rely on the OS, and the training costs of staff… not to mention the general upheaval involved with a total system upgrade. I’m sure many businesses do upgrade and find ways of reducing the cost, but many do not. I know businesses still using XP-based systems.
I have a +10 year old Toshiba lap top and it was just getting bogged down to uselessness with constant upgrades so I turned off all that stuff several years ago.
The anti-virus approach remained and we finally upgraded to W10 last year and we paid $ for it as we waited too long until the ‘obsolete news’ came through. So unhappy with the fact that my perfectly functional printer was no longer supported and is now a hunk of plastic pollution waiting to be discarded. I tried all the old drivers and researched solutions to no avail, even with the assistance of a savvy friend. We eventually bought a new wireless that supports our ipads but the waste is very bothersome to me.
I only keep this old system running to support Neckdiagrams software and running Taxes through to hopefully start the green machine, but that’s another story.
Just googled that, looks quite interesting. Thanks
So much misinformation in this thread. Computer security issues are real, and if you don’t keep your systems patched you’re risking your data - and bank accounts. Applying updates should be done to all computers, phones, network devices. They all need them.
What @mattswain says is right, newer versions of OSes are built from the same code base, not from scratch, but the older ones don’t get patched so remain vulnerable.
In companies it’s a huge issue. For individuals there is less probability they’ll get hacked but it’s still a possibility.
I’d also add that a lot of big companies are effectively run by accountants rather than I.T. security experts and if the big spend of upgrading all of the company PCs can be deferred to next year (or the year after) then it will be. In the case of very large companies they can pay Microsoft for extended support beyond when the OS is officially unsupported, an expensive option but potentially cheaper than updating all of it’s PCs.
My old pc runs Windows 2000. When started up it gives me time to eat breakfast and have a couple of coffees before anything comes up on the screen.
I used it recently to print off my Christmas card address labels. I’m currently trying to work out how to transfer an MS Access data base and a load of photos to my shiny new IPad.
Our IT support has always recommended (for network security reasons) having the latest OS, although we are still running win10 at this point.
I dumped my dog of an Acer PC into storage a couple of years back in favour of my iPad, and never looked back. The user experience is like night and day…once you get used to Apple’s way of doing things.
Can’t really help with the Access conversion. Maybe export to CSV format file, and import into the iPad equivalent app? I don’t know if there is a lightweight database equivalent app for iOS, but there is a free spreadsheet app.
I’m iPad first (with a laptop for the odd task it can’t do) and I’d say look at either cloud storage or network attached storage (NAS) device for photos. It’s not that the iPad can’t do it, but using it’s own internal storage is a very expensive way of storing photos, which if you value you shouldn’t hold in just one place anyway. I don’t do anything with databases but I think the options are very limited
@Tbushell @mattswain
Hi guys. We’re going a bit off piste from the original topic here…….
I’ve been using the Apple spreadsheet app (Numbers) to create a basic searchable data base of all the songs in my various songbooks. The only problem is the time it’s taking to type it all up using 2 fingers. 
It’s not going to be any use for a Christmas card label list that can then be printed out on label paper as it’s too basic I think. So far I haven’t come across a solution for that. I don’t want to be hand writing out the addresses next Christmas!
Regarding photos, I’ve discovered I can transfer them from my pc to the iCloud and they are then viewable on my iPad and iPhone.
The thing I don’t quite understand about the iCloud is that if I delete a photo from my iPad or iPhone it is also deleted from the iCloud. That means it’s a mirror image not a back up as such. Yes, it saves space on the device because you can save a low resolution version on the device but it doesn’t give you a safe storage solution. So other than being able to look at photos across different devices I don’t really see the point of it.
The idea of the “sync to cloud” is that the cloud account can hold a lot more photos than your phone, and it also allows you to share to other people.
The phone will sometimes “archive” older photos from itself by removing the file from the phone, but keeping them on the cloud for storage and later retrieval by the phone if you decide to look at those photos.
It’s not really meant as a full backup, and other backup services are recommended for that (e.g. Time Machine). Although it can act as a limited backup if your phone dies or is stolen.
This is a similar capability to Google Photos. Note that Google Photos works on both Apple and Android, which may be important if you want to share selected albums with other people.
Cheers,
Keith