Usability and security are really
important topics. Here I describe what
I've done about them and, in particular,
why I'm considering depending Windows 7
Professional for a lot more.

Recently I've spent many hours using
Windows 7 on one computer and Windows 10
on another.

So far, I prefer Windows 7. For the
difference in "usability", maybe you mean
the changes and/or additions since Windows
7.

To me it seems that there are some people
at Microsoft who have a vision of user
interface, user experience, usability
they want and want Windows to move to
that. The early, seed example of their
vision is the GUI, graphical user
interface, but I am guessing they want to
move to hand gestures, eyeball tracking,
special 3D goggles, lots of inferencing
to guess, anticipate what a user wants,
etc.

Some people can really like that vision,
especially if it is done well, but that
seems difficult.

For some parts of computing, versions of
such a vision might be the right things to
pursue.

For me, for a computer I would use, I
don't want the vision. The changes I
saw from Windows 7 to Windows 10 seem to
be part of the vision, and, whatever
they are, I don't like them. One big
issue is, I don't know what all the
changes are: Apparently I'm supposed just
to discover the changes. Well, maybe
I've discovered less than half of the
changes.

Some of the changes I really hate: E.g.,
with Windows 10 too often suddenly all the
open windows disappear! And too often I'm
trying to work quickly, by accident hit
some strange key combinations, and
suddenly big, goofy things happen.

For me, personally, my main used of a
computer are just (a) typing text, (b) Web
browsing, (c) watching movies on DVDs, (d)
occasionally printing some letters or
addressing envelopes.

So, my most heavily used program is the
one I use for nearly all my typing, my
favorite text editor, Kedit -- right,
trying Emacs is on my TODO list.
Otherwise, I use Firefox and Chrome for
Web browsing and VLC or PowerDVD for
movies (or music CDs).

Otherwise my favorite part of Windows is
the hierarchical file system NTFS (new
technology file system), and to help me
use that I use the scripting language
Rexx, have written a lot of macros, and
have written a simple shell (runs in
console windows and gets my typing and
does the right things with it).

Windows 10, 7 and maybe even still XP and
2000 are all plenty good at all of that.

So, point: For me, personally, for the
parts of Windows 7 I use, usability is
fine; I don't want to be bothered with
changes; in Windows 10 I'd welcome a big
OFF switch so that I could get rid of the
results of the vision.

For me, my car is not my destination and
is just a tool I use to get to some
destinations. For my personal usage, my
computer is not my destination but just
a tool. For me, the goals of the vision
make bad tools.

I should insert: For me, often GUIs are
inefficient because it is tough to
script such programs, that is, run one
of them 200,000 times to automate some
work.

For the rest of my interest in
"usability":

I'm trying to do an Internet startup, that
is, a Web site. For that I've done some
programming, appear to have the code
working as intended, but no doubt will
need to do more. And I will need to
handle some dozens of terabytes of data.

I settled on Visual Basic .NET for the
programming language, ASP.NET for the Web
pages, ADO.NET and SQL Server for the data
base.

For .NET, it looks quite capable. Also,
Microsoft seems to be taking it very
seriously, and a lot of important work is
being done with it. So, it seem like a
good choice for my startup.

Visual Basic .NET (VB)? It appears to be
a perfectly good way to get to the .NET
framework and the CLR (common language
runtime). C# seems to have borrowed some
of the C syntax that, as I recall from
Kernighan and Ritchie, was deliberately
idiosyncratic. To me, the VB syntax is
more traditional, more like Basic,
Fortran, Algol, PL/I, Pascal, etc. and is
easier to teach, learn, read, and write
and less error prone. My understanding is
that the semantics of VB and C# are (or
long were) essentially the same, and that
there is a program to translate from
either one to the other. So, the
difference is syntactic sugar.

For .NET? I welcome the work on managed
code, garbage collection (management of
dynamic memory allocation and freeing),
etc. If managed code is a little slower
than C, C++, or assembler, fine with me:
Current processors with 8, 10, 16, etc.
cores and clock speeds 4+ GHz seem plenty
up to running managed code for the Web
site of my startup. And for servers
processors with, what, 256 cores are
coming?

For the last time I checked ad rates, a
day my Web site with a 4.0 GHz 8 core
processor gets busy should be a good day
for my bank account.

For Visual Studio, once I tried it for
about an hour, could make no sense out of
it, and never tried it again. I type my
code into Kedit. So far, it's worked
fine. Then I wrote a few little macros
that make Kedit work even better. Happy
camper time. I know; likely Emacs could
be still better.

For my business, writing and running .NET
code as above is the "usability" I want.

If Microsoft wants some improvements, then
okay:

(1) Copying files for backup: Robocopy
seems to work, and it is what I use.
Getting all the options set took a while.
The log file it writes is ugly, and I
can't make any sense out of a lot of it.

To me, XCOPY has some serious problems
with how it handles dates and times.

For Microsoft's "Windows 7 backup", for
Acronis, etc., I can make little or no
sense out of them.

So, for a step forward, I'd like a better
backup program. Right, no vision thing.
No GUI. Command line only. Excellent
design. Good documentation.

(2) List of the names in a file system
directory tree.

Commands DIR and ATTRIB are ways to get a
good list. I have a command SUBDIR from
Rexx that is my favorite. But a better
program would be welcome. Right, no
vision thing. No GUI. Command line
only. Excellent design. Good
documentation.

(3) Check two files for equality.

I just want to see if two files are equal
or not. Don't assume anything about the
contents of the files -- don't assume that
they are lines of text, from Office Word,
etc. Don't try to find all the places the
two files are different or the same.

So, COMP is the wrong tool. And FC can't
handle legal file tree names.

So need a program that will compare two
files for being equal, yes or no, and with
the output only the first byte where they
are not equal. Right, no vision thing.
No GUI. Command line only. Excellent
design. Good documentation.

I wrote my own using Rexx and its function
Charin.

Now for the important topic of security:

Some months ago I did download that last
update for Windows 7 Professional. Then I
noticed that apparently that update also
is for the corresponding edition of
Windows Server, apparently 2008.

Uh, I should interject here: In my
startup, I will need some simple, routine,
lightly used file sharing among a few
computers. From my information gathering,
I conclude that such file sharing will be
a lot easier with Windows 7 Professional
than with any version of Windows Server.
So, at least for the early months of my
startup going live, it appears that it
will be easier to use Windows 7
Professional than Windows Server.

So, I begin to conclude that with that
last update Windows 7 Professional is as
secure as Windows Server 2008.

Then I have to assume that for some years
many of the most important companies in
the world ran fine on Windows Server 2008.

Gathering information for my planning for
the first months of going live with my Web
site, I learned

(1) For updates, e.g., for security,
Microsoft seems to be cooperating with
customers who are still using versions of
Windows Server that go way back, to 2008
and before.

(2) Microsoft has announced that they will
continue to have security updates for
Windows Professional into 2023.

So, from my need to make decisions based
on limited information, I'm concluding
that:

(a) Basically Windows, just the
(apparently at most slowly changing)
operating system itself is and has for 10+
years been quite, maybe rock solidly,
secure. Maybe the US NSA (National
Security Agency, the main US organization
for communications security) knows better,
but as just a startup entrepreneur I'm
f'getting about such things. Sure, some
hacker in North Korea might send goofy UDP
packets at my IP address, but Microsoft
needed to have Windows Server 2008 protect
against those packets already 10+ years
ago. So, let the goofy packets come;
Windows should throw them into the trash
bit bucket. If there really is a DoS
(denial of service) attack or some such,
maybe I should call CloudFlare.

(b) The security problems Windows 10, 11,
etc. struggle with are caused not by
Windows itself but by some of the common
applications, maybe Web browsers, browser
add ons, various programs distributed as
EXE files, and some actions of careless
users.

Point: Using Windows 7 Professional for
my personal computing, startup software
development, and startup Web servers seems
fine with no worries about usability or
security.