That's interesting - I have a Windows 7 machine on a really old laptop. It has some pirate factory scan tools on it (Toyota, Honda, Ford, BMW) and my oscilloscope software. Haven't booted it for a while and it hasn't been connected to the internet since 2020 - I haven't noticed that doing it. I was so paranoid I actually physically removed the wifi card from it. Funny how officially its only security updates but if you are right behind the scenes they basically run it on the same creepy AI that Windows 10 and 11 run on. From everything I know about the Windows OS they absolutely have the capability to do that and there is nothing you can do really.
You know mate depending on what you do you should try Linux Mint - its very user friendly. It's Ubuntu based. With the Cinnamon desktop its basically a windows 7 work alike. For my general computing needs - internet, documents, watching videos and doing some light photo editing, programming, listening to music there is decent Linux software to do all of that. Linux plays better with AMD graphics than Nvidia though. If you've got an old machine it'll be happier on Linux Mint than it ever was on windows. My sisters 12 year old laptop that runs a 540m i5 at idle it uses 2% CPU and 1GB or RAM. Generally it can cope with the browser and 1080p video, she uses it for working from home and gets by with it though the RAM and the processor use is high with modern applications. You have to learn the terminal a bit and get used to doing things the linux way instead of the windows way and I spend a bit of time combing through stack exchange. Mint is also a very stable distro and a stable system - I did bork a few of my systems early on entering commands I didn't understand but my current system is 3 years old and very stable with one little bug with software I use an alternative to and 1 time it kernel panicked. My dads Windows 10 laptop has had stability issues and weird bugs. I end up having to look at it every 6-8 weeks.
That's interesting - I have a Windows 7 machine on a really old laptop. It has some pirate factory scan tools on it (Toyota, Honda, Ford, BMW) and my oscilloscope software. Haven't booted it for a while and it hasn't been connected to the internet since 2020 - I haven't noticed that doing it. I was so paranoid I actually physically removed the wifi card from it. Funny how officially its only security updates but if you are right behind the scenes they basically run it on the same creepy AI that Windows 10 and 11 run on. From everything I know about the Windows OS they absolutely have the capability to do that and there is nothing you can do really.
You know mate depending on what you do you should try Linux Mint - its very user friendly. It's Ubuntu based. With the Cinnamon desktop its basically a windows 7 work alike. For my general computing needs - internet, documents, watching videos and doing some light photo editing, programming, listening to music there is decent Linux software to do all of that. Linux plays better with AMD graphics than Nvidia though. If you've got an old machine it'll be happier on Linux Mint than it ever was on windows. My sisters 12 year old laptop that runs a 540m i5 at idle it uses 2% CPU and 1GB or RAM. Generally it can cope with the browser and 1080p video, she uses it for working from home and gets by with it though the RAM and the processor use is high with modern applications. You have to learn the terminal a bit and get used to doing things the linux way instead of the windows way and I spend a bit of time combing through stack exchange. Mint is also a very stable distro and a stable system - I did bork a few of my systems early on entering commands I didn't understand but my current system is 3 years old and very stable with one little bug with software I use an alternative to and 1 time it kernel panicked. My dads Windows 10 laptop has had stability issues and weird bugs. I end up having to look at it every 6-8 weeks.