I've heard LibreOffice has settings that make it look like Word

Idk, it was horrendously insecure, would freeze a lot, and missing creature comforts like window tiling.

It was significantly more secure than it's DOS-based predecessor of the time, Windows ME (that's a whole other rabbit hole; if you wanna talk insecure and buggy as fuck - look no further). That's what people don't realize, they look at the past through a modern lens. You gotta look at it from the time it was released. There's a reason mainstream consumer-focused Windows editions dropped DOS and moved to the NT kernel. XP was the first real consuner version of Windows based on XP.

If they kept refining Win7 it would've been great.

They did, it was called "Windows 8" and nobody liked it.

I'd still be using Windows 7 if I could.

I'm sure it makes the bean counters happier to have another asset valued at X amount, but in practice the software will just be locked in some vault where it won't do anyone any good.

Its an instance where the number on the screen doesn't actually correspond to any useful economic activity.

I wouldn't be surprised if there are a bumper crop of level 10 CVEs in the latest and "greatest" version of Windows 7 that will never get patched. Unless you have one of those special enterprise licenses that they keep updating.

But this article is talking about people running Windows 7 today, so comparing current actions through a modern lens is entirely valid

Windows 8 removed the start button, 8.1 brought back most all of the "legacy" UI features (which still persist today).

And a lot of people are actually stuck because the Windows XP/7 machine is attached to industrial equipment that costs an unbelievable amount of money or is just impossible to replace.

They seemingly wanted to design the entire interface around touchscreen 2-in-1s. If you went in a Microsoft store around the time windows 8 came out, they were leaning really hard into the 2-in-1s. I got a surface pro 3 at that time that I used to take handwritten notes in school, and the windows 8 interface was honestly awesome with that use case. On my desktop PC, though, I held out updating from 7 until windows 10.

Hey she could still be chill and using Win 95 to this day!

I mean, you can if you want to

I would still be using Windows 7 if it was safe to connect to the internet.

I can't believe government systems are just open to cyber security like that.

Are there not cyber terrorists for some teenager that has tried to do anything with these unsecured systems?

I run a computer on Win7 at work, because it needs some important legacy software. It can't be containered because it has a nasty licence manager.

And my oscilloscope runs on Win98.

It's not safe and all that stuff.

Check if there's alternatives to what you use in Windows, or if there's a Linux version. Decide if you need to use the windows program, or if the Linux equivalent will work. There may be a learning curve to using a different program, but I haven't yet really found anything that doesn't have an equivalent that isn't a program paired with hardware that will only work with each other.

It might be. I remember buying a laptop at that time and it came with 8 and it annoyed me so dang much.

I've had success with Office 2010 under Wine.

WineHQ - Microsoft Office (installer only) 2010 (64 bit)

Open Source Software for running Windows applications on other operating systems.

(appdb.winehq.org)

Ancient industrial machines use ancient windows computers. This has been known forever. There's a whole niche industry of very expensive ram and hard drives and other components keeping this industry going

But how else can it book requests for priority access, and verify the credit card for whoever booked the elevator?

In highrises with lots of stops and users, it uses some more advanced software to schedule the optimal stops, or distribute the load between multiple lifts. A similar concept exists for HDD controllers, where the read write arm must move to different positions to load data stored on different plates and sectors, and Repositioning the head is a slow and expensive process that cuts down the data transfer rate.