Support for the Unsupported

[DKatana]

This thread is for vocalizing wholesome and reasonable support for those continuing to use Windows 7 and 8 for Steam gaming. As of yesterday these operating systems became unsupported on Steam.

As so many topics rightly said: there are valid reasons for keeping Windows 7 and 8 for PC games. Certain old or niche games are incompatible or run badly on Win 10/11. Older PCs cannot run Win 10/11 so well. Some are opposed to the telemetry and data collection introduced with Win 10, or prefer the simpler, easy to use aspects of 7. No amount of 'lol just upgrade bro' invalidates these issues.

[Komarimaru]

Originally posted by Bad_Conduct:

Originally posted by Komarimaru:

Perhaps it should be bricked, but currently they just block access to the servers. The last working version of the client does work for playing games, as long as you've another method for validation.

e.i. Copying the acf and other needed files over to the older machine, or cheating by installing the game with a current up to date machine to a NAS like I do, allowing older machines to access said verified games.

Yes, they see the continued use of unsupported operating systems as a security risk.

Upgrade your OS.

Oh, mine is well and up to date. I use the NAS for my retro rigs. Much easier to have a games folder on the NAS, since HDD's are fine for old machines to read from.

[Bad_Conduct]

Originally posted by Komarimaru:

Originally posted by Bad_Conduct:

Yes, they see the continued use of unsupported operating systems as a security risk.

Upgrade your OS.

Oh, mine is well and up to date. I use the NAS for my retro rigs. Much easier to have a games folder on the NAS, since HDD's are fine for old machines to read from.

I use SSD's in my retro rig. Just copy ISO's as I need them, running them over the network would be pretty slow.

[Komarimaru]

Originally posted by Bad_Conduct:

Originally posted by Komarimaru:

Oh, mine is well and up to date. I use the NAS for my retro rigs. Much easier to have a games folder on the NAS, since HDD's are fine for old machines to read from.

I use SSD's in my retro rig. Just copy ISO's as I need them, running them over the network would be pretty slow.

Oh, well, the network is faster than my HDD's in my NAS, lol WD Red Pro 16TB x4. So, much easier and faster to download digital games to the NAS when not using physical media for the older machines.

[Bad_Conduct]

Originally posted by Komarimaru:

Originally posted by Bad_Conduct:

I use SSD's in my retro rig. Just copy ISO's as I need them, running them over the network would be pretty slow.

Oh, well, the network is faster than my HDD's in my NAS, lol WD Red Pro 16TB x4. So, much easier and faster to download digital games to the NAS when not using physical media for the older machines.

Not even close.

Your network is 1Gbps, SATA III peak is 6 Gb/sec. Even PATA is about 1Gbps.
It's either going to bottleneck on the network speed, the retrorig's network card, or the PATA speed (if your systems are pre SATA).

Network is a huge bottleneck.

[Komarimaru]

Originally posted by Bad_Conduct:

Originally posted by Komarimaru:

Oh, well, the network is faster than my HDD's in my NAS, lol WD Red Pro 16TB x4. So, much easier and faster to download digital games to the NAS when not using physical media for the older machines.

Not even close.

Your network is 1Gbps, SATA III peak is 6 Gb/sec. Even PATA is about 1Gbps.
It's either going to bottleneck on the network speed, the retrorig's network card, or the PATA speed (if your systems are pre SATA).

Network is a huge bottleneck.

Perhaps for you, but I've been using a 10GbE for my home network for quite a long while now so installing takes zero time to the NAS from my main rig.

And while SATA is called 6gb, that's bits, not bites. So the max theoretical output is 600MB/s. And lemme tell ya, none of my retro rigs need that, since even my Raptor 10K drives back in the day weren't that fast. So reading from my NAS to play games, zero issues on old games, even at the slower 1GbE line.

[Bad_Conduct]

Originally posted by Komarimaru:

Originally posted by Bad_Conduct:

Not even close.

Your network is 1Gbps, SATA III peak is 6 Gb/sec. Even PATA is about 1Gbps.
It's either going to bottleneck on the network speed, the retrorig's network card, or the PATA speed (if your systems are pre SATA).

Network is a huge bottleneck.

Perhaps for you, but I've been using a 10GbE for my home network for quite a long while now so installing takes zero time to the NAS from my main rig.

And while SATA is called 6gb, that's bits, not bites. So the max theoretical output is 600MB/s. And lemme tell ya, none of my retro rigs need that, since even my Raptor 10K drives back in the day weren't that fast. So reading from my NAS to play games, zero issues on old games, even at the slower 1GbE line.

You don't need to convert SATA III from Gb to MB when Ethernet is also measured in Gb.
1Gbps < 6Gbps. Ethernet is about 125MB/s, if you compared to SATA's 600

[Stellar Remnant]

I've been using Windows 10 since 2015 and of hundreds of games, the only one that I've had problems with (frequent crashes) is Control.

[Zefar]

Originally posted by Cray:

Win10 and 11 take too much control of your system. I considered switching and changing all the irksome bits, but learned that even if you do so, a few updates later they'll break the changes you made and it's back to square one.

What sort of control are you missing on Win10 and Win11?

Also if it's only about updates I must ask why you hate updates so much? Surely you updated to the latest version of Win7 so updates there wasn't an issue.
I've yet to have one update that break something that I've done.

Originally posted by Cray:

They're near impossible to actually wrangle with and get control back from, because with every odd update they'll break the changes you made and/or introduce something new.

Can you name any examples?

Originally posted by Cray:

Windows has become a CaaP (customer as a product) leaning OS, with increased focus on tying the user into cloudl services, displaying ads (which some pretend aren't ads) on the start menu, and collecting all sorts of data and telemetry (not to mention the extra leaked by the bundled apps, etc.).

Literally do not see ads on Win10 or Win11. I have read that if you use a local account you might actually see some. Which is fun because those people are like "I want FULL control of my system!"

Originally posted by Cray:

Of course, the writing was on the wall. microsoff stopped supporting win7/8 completely in early 2023, and not long after valve made the announcement. And therein lies the rub - microsoft had warned about this many, many years in advance and reminded people repeatedly that support would be ending. Valve didn't.

Windows 7 stopped getting support by Microsoft in 2020. UNLESS! You where subscribed to Windows 7 Extended Security Updates (ESU) which the normal user was not.

Valve had a warning for nearly a year and the people on Win7 has known the OS was not supported for the last 3 years.

Originally posted by 😡 Duck 😡:

The fact is that some older computers, although they can install win10, usually have reduced performance because win10 has more telemetry and privacy collectors running in the background of the system, as well as some unnecessary processes that may be able to be turned off with some optimisation tools to boost performance a little, but may result in a system that is unstable, and not all of us are in a position to do that.

You can turn them down a lot to the point where the affect of them won't do a thing to your old PC.
But all of this is fixed with a SSD.

Originally posted by 😡 Duck 😡:

Not only does it run slower, win10 takes up more of the hard drive, it's not a good idea to continue running win10 on a mechanical hard drive, you may need to buy a faster SSD.

It's a harddrive. It made every OS slower the longer you used it. 95,98,XP,Vista and even 7. All of them. You have to format them once a year or so in order to keep it running nicely.

SSD is mandatory and super cheap these days. You can get one for your OS alone and keep it at 256 GB at most and it'll more than enough for your OS drive.

I ran from Win8.1 to Win11 on the same SSD only using Upgrade option. After 7-8 years my SSD died on me but up to that point it was still fast. No matter how many games or programs I had installed. I didn't do a single format during this entire time.
Went to the store bought a new 256 GB one and installed Win11 on it.

Originally posted by 😡 Duck 😡:

They also don't care that there are still poor people in the world, they don't care if they have the money to get a new computer that can run win10 better, they just want to shut the poor people up so that it doesn't affect their mood every day.

If you have a system specs that are so bad it's actually can't run Win10 you're not gonna be able to run much at all on that system that is slightly modern.

Win10 has the same system reqs as Win7 do btw.

[Komarimaru]

Originally posted by Bad_Conduct:

Originally posted by Komarimaru:

Perhaps for you, but I've been using a 10GbE for my home network for quite a long while now so installing takes zero time to the NAS from my main rig.

And while SATA is called 6gb, that's bits, not bites. So the max theoretical output is 600MB/s. And lemme tell ya, none of my retro rigs need that, since even my Raptor 10K drives back in the day weren't that fast. So reading from my NAS to play games, zero issues on old games, even at the slower 1GbE line.

You don't need to convert SATA III from Gb to MB when Ethernet is also measured in Gb.
1Gbps < 6Gbps. Ethernet is about 125MB/s, if you compared to SATA's 600

Which is plenty for games between pre 1992 and 2007, wouldn't you agree?

It's not like I'm trying to play Cyberpunk 2077 on my Pentium 233MMX.

[Bad_Conduct]

Originally posted by Komarimaru:

Originally posted by Bad_Conduct:

You don't need to convert SATA III from Gb to MB when Ethernet is also measured in Gb.
1Gbps < 6Gbps. Ethernet is about 125MB/s, if you compared to SATA's 600

Which is plenty for games between pre 1992 and 2007, wouldn't you agree?

It's not like I'm trying to play Cyberpunk 2077 on my Pentium 233MMX.

Depends. PCI 33 bus is only 1066Mbps, you are most likely only running 100Mbps Ethernet on a Pentium based system. If you are running a 1Gbps PCI card, you are straining your PCI throughput and potentially slowing down other components (like a gpu).

I wouldn't call it ideal for running games, no. I would still copy the games locally and run them. Networking is hard on system resources on top of that, not ideal on a single core processor.

[DKatana]

Originally posted by Steven Seagull:

It is not 0.06% but 0.74% (0.06+0.68).
See here: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/

And if we count in Win 8.1 users too, that gives 0.89% in total.
Because the support for Win 8.1 has ended too, just like for Win 7.

As of last August, Steam has approximately 120 million active monthly users: https://backlinko.com/steam-users#steam-monthly-active-users

0.89% still equates to over a million users now running unsupported software.

[Jon the VGNerd]

Originally posted by xBCxRangers:

Originally posted by Komarimaru:

It was many comments I've stated that Support dropped does not equate to a bricked client, not one.

And you never came for information, your post history is quite public. So unless you intended to delete all your posts(Which won't matter since most are quoted by others so already archived), it clearly shows you've done nothing but hook onto any lie as a fact, to then get upset when proven wrong, repeatedly and frequently.

And my comments have been a correction of misinformation, unlike yours with your conspiracy theories, ignorance and refusing to educate yourself on said topics, and you instigating others with lies and fallacies.

Perhaps in the future, you'll refrain from doing such things, so won't feel tortured when corrected with facts.

People will come here with questions and matters as they deem fit. And when you're wrong, be a man and admit it. It's not only the right thing to do, it just may be the polite thing to do.

Now, disappear.

"Blocked user - Show"

That's that. Ridiculous.

Still as immature and ignorant as ever. How droll.

Welcome to 2024, buddy. Enjoy living in denial.

[Shaggin'Wagon]

Originally posted by xBCxRangers:

People will come here with questions and matters as they deem fit.

Actually no: They can not. Part of Steam ending "support" for Windows 7 means that anyone still using Steam on Windows 7 can no longer request assistance or "support" for anything wrong with steam on their OS. Any tickets created to steam support staff about Windows 7 will be automatically closed with a boiler-plate response. They can create a thread in the forums but everyone is welcome to respond with: "Windows 7 isn't supported by steam. Upgrade to a supported OS if you want help with Steam". Which by the way everyone should start copy-pasting and issuing as a response to all windows 7 threads created. It would solve a lot of issues.

[DKatana]

Originally posted by xBCxRangers:

Originally posted by C²C^Guyver |NZB|:

What? No absurd plea for help from Mr Newell that is also a veiled insult?

We have our games. What else needs to be said.

True, and to add...

Talk of Steam suddenly bricking for 7/8 users is pure speculation. If/when issues crop up, Win 7/8 will receive technical support unofficially between the community. For those of us who have an older PC with Win7 for enjoying classic titles like the original Rome: Total War, life goes on. The sky isn't falling.

[Letobrick]

I agree, for anyone who plays older games on Steam, Windows 7 and 8 support on Steam MUST continue, end of story.