When UEFI and 64-bit Windows came along, I switched to Macrium Reflect Free, initially for cloning, and later (with a “modern” laptop that requires minor surgery to open) for imaging. (The aforementioned hard drives were *bad news*!) I don’t think I ever had to swap in a clone of my *own* system back then, but xxclone saved the butts of friends and relatives I’d set it up for at least five times that I can remember. It even had an option to automatically rewrite the original volume label to the clone when the cloning/updating was done (which, correct me if I’m wrong, Macrium doesn’t offer). It was a file-by-file cloning/copying utility, so the initial clone took quite a while to complete, but daily updates typically took only a small handful of minutes. The trolls live on 4Chan and Reddit, not here…īack in the days of BIOS, 32-bit Windows, IBM “Deathstar” mechanical drives, and WD “click-of-death” mechanical drives, I used xxclone, a lesser-known utility from the outfit that made xxcopy. Especially when new codebases are used and developers would rather move forward as well. It won’t stop technology from moving forward, and you’ll just have to toughen up and deal with it. OpenShell is a thing for everyone who refuses to “deal with” change (stretching the brain is a good thing, and letting yourself get frustrated over stuff is a fast way to make learning take longer).īut you do you and complain away about how everyone is dropping support for dead software. Secondly… The underlying architecture is very stable as long as your hardware is truly stable (side note, you’d be surprised how many BSOD can be caused by aging capacitors in a PSU or motherboard, a crappy VRM, or RAM that gets just a little too warm). To change anything in Windows 7 or especially XP required some seriously draconian BS to work around.

Sure, whatever, they have some easy-to-remove bloat, but that’s the thing, a few PowerShell commands, and poof, gone. Windows 10 is the first time MS has actually done something right since NT4&5 (long live Windows 2000 Pro). That’s not even mentioning all the BS Windows 7 has caused with USB devices in an environment where 10 to 16-port hubs are used to connect and test phones…

Boot times were far faster to start, and on top of that, the days of having to reinstall XP or 7 due to severe user profile inflation or just underlying bugginess of the System Restore function (we don’t speak of ME because it was the start of that BS). There is an Optiplex 980 (i7-970) that also runs 10. I have a Dell Dimension E521 (AMD) that I installed Windows 10, and with or w/o an SSD, it ran laps around the Windows 7 install. The one and only good thing it brought to the table was an improved version of Aero, and that was it.

Windows 7 was as laughable as Vista before it.

Macrium reflect serial number