Reply to post: Divorcing Microsoft

Divorcing Microsoft

Because of the 2020 deadline I've been doing experiments.... I work mostly with air-gapped Win7 boxes and Linux-Mint internet facing boxes. So for my needs Libre-Office is fine (although I also have Office-2000 with the compatibility pack lying around for reading docx / xlsx). However in my home others need access to Office and the Ribbon because that's what they're comfortable with.

I don't fancy a move to Office 365 / Win10 especially when I read that even Office 365 customers won't escape Win7's demise. The effort Microsoft is going to here... It feels like innovation has been totally replaced by a subscription upgrade boot stamping on a human face forever...

Its especially true when I watch how those in my household actually use Office. They're using such basic aspects they could work fine with just Office-2000. That's the laughable part. Its the lack of any real new functionality in later versions of Office. So in light of that, I started to look around for Plan-B. Sharing here in case its of help / interest to anyone else...

First I tried imaging by main Win7 production machines. However, they're based on EFI / UEFI. I can image them ok (disk2vhd), but I can't get a single one to boot. So I tried an older 32-Bit Win7 laptop. I've now gotten Win7 running in VirtualBox (Oracle) on Linux-Mint. The VM runs fine and has the newer Office to solve the ribbon issue. On boot there is an 'Activation Expiry' warning screen, but the OS never expires.

I tried doing the same thing with a couple of XP machines that I want to keep around, but no luck. Just to boot you have to opt for safemode, and then you've no proper access to hardware etc, so its not viable. BTW: None of the documented XP activation reg key tweaks helped.

So why was Win7 easier?

Not sure... Its an older machine and its not had many official updates or changes to the OS over time. All extraneous Services and Scheduled Tasks and Updaters were halted long ago. But which sub-system is directly responsible for the activation countdown? ... I'm thinking if updates had been applied it may have been far harder to have gotten this working so easily...

I know it works though as the Win7 drive was inserted into another machine 3 years ago and the OS has never expired. So I can keep this Win7 VM around indefinitely and run it under Mint just fine. I still want my family to adopt Linux and FOSS though, as my work is heavily based off open-source. So this is just a stop gap.... One I wish wasn't necessary. But its a better option than Win10 will ever provide!

Dear folks @ Redmond. I wouldn't be going to all this trouble if you weren't basically embedding Facebook + Google like privacy-raping at OS level and then lying about it (see what MS Chairmen thinks MS do with user data). This aspect, along with forced updates and treating regular windows users as test tube dummies is UNACCEPTABLE!