Minor nitpick, by the way; these companies (Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc.) aren’t billion-dollar corporations. Instead they are trillion-dollar corporations, at least if you’re looking at their market capitalizations.
I’m thinking about my 2005 Pontiac Sunfire. I needed cheap, basic transportation and that car filled the bill nicely. After my wife and I both retired, we decided we didn’t need two cars anymore so I gave the Sunfire to my son, literally a poor graduate student. He put another 50,000 or so miles on it before the clutch assembly (it was a manual, of course) wore out. By then, GM had had stopped making clutch assemblies for Pontiac Sunfires, they had stopped making Sunfires, and they had stopped making Pontiacs. The junkyard clutch assemblies were just as worn out as our Sunfire’s.
Sometimes you gotta let go.
Well, this Old Fart just gotta say, I be lovin’ this here Supermium, which is now installed on my primary and most important desktop PC. It’s been scanned seven ways to Sunday with virus and malware detectors. It identifies as “Chrome”, is fully up to date, has been enabled with Adblocker-Plus, and I’ve just now imported all my old browser bookmarks into it. I don’t know if “Godsend” is too strong a term, but this browser is … nice!
And sometimes you gotta hang on! 
(The above post brought to you by Supermium, running on Windows 7, and nobody died!)
It’s not really about Windows 7. I agree that expecting software to be developed for such an old version of Windows is silly. It totally makes sense that Firefox and Chrome have moved on.
The issue is that Discourse requires a newer browser than nearly every website I’ve ever encountered. The fact that these newer browsers don’t run on Windows 7 is just a side effect.
Comparing it to time periods that far in the past is inapt (IMHO), however, because the actual computer hardware was improving much more quickly back then. And, furthermore, you always could keep your older version of software developed then, while you can’t keep the older version of Discourse.
Supermium is exactly what I recommend, but I would suggest replacing Adblock Plus with AdGuard Adblocker.
It’s lighter weight (better for older computers) and it has a good track record with dealing with sites like YouTube that try to beat adblockers.
It’s not as good as uBlock Origin, but that one will not be updated past June since Chrome will be removing it from the store. I personally will use uBlock Origin until it starts breaking on sites I care about, but you may not want to bother.
(Note, I even use Supermium on Windows 10/11, because it has more customization than standard Chrome, allowing me to fix some major annoyances like menus that are too big and require scrolling.)
I run virtual machines for operating systems above and beyond what I want to live in as my main OS.
I have a Windows 11 and a Sequoia VM (among others)
I’m happy if you’re happy, but you are both delaying the inevitable day when you will finally have to change, at the same time as making that inevitable change a less comfortable process when it does happen.
One of the other things I like about this particular computer is that it was a real powerhouse in its day and, for my purposes, still is. It’s a fast quad-core i7 that reports a “Windows Experience Index” of 6.7 on a scale that has a maximum value of 7. (The only thing holding it back a bit is the integrated on-chip graphics, but since I’m not a gamer I couldn’t care less about graphics performance.) I’m not worried about performance and I’ve been comfortable with Adblock for years on Firefox and Edge.
Regardless, my single-minded objective at this time is to keep this beautiful Optiplex desktop viable as long as possible. As I mentioned, I even have a new Dell Windows 11 laptop that I’ll use for limited purposes – my problem is that I tend to really get settled into any given computing environment and I absolutely despise the hassles of migrating to a new OS, particularly one like Windows 11 that has a reputation for being a piece of shit.
Yeah, I know what you mean. I’d have happily stuck with windows 8.1 forever if I had the choice and windows 11 is on a definite downward trajectory imo - I solved the issue by migrating to Linux where I have more control over how the ui looks and there is just no bloatware and AI garbage - unless you want those things, but they are opt-in rather than baked-in.
Microsoft was saying Copilot couldn’t be uninstalled because it’s too tightly integrated into the os, then just recently they accidentally released an update that uninstalls it
I keep delaying the latest update to my Mac which is supposed to offer AI on my home laptop. Maybe I’ll want that in the future. I don’t want it now.
But at some point i will have to accept the “upgrade”.
I explicitly don’t want it and at least when Microsoft first shoehorned it into office, there was no option to turn it off.
The main reason I used word was to write something that came from inside of me, but Copilot was always jumping up to volunteer to write it badly for me.
“Hey, you know that thing you love? Why don’t we automate it so you never do it anymore?”
Yeah, i don’t know how pushy apple intelligence will be.
In my experience, Microsoft Word isn’t that aggressive about pushing Copilot. If I open a new blank document, the first line says “Select the icon or press Alt + i to draft with Copilot.” However, if I simply start typing, that goes away and I am not getting any further prompts.
So Copilot is the new Clippy?
Sure, but it’s smarter.
New bumper sticker: Clippy is my Copilot
In other words, it’s so old that it still has a Windows Experience Index 
Comparing it to a modern i7, you are looking at about 1/2 the single threaded performance and 1/3 the multithreaded performance. I added in an N150 for comparison, which is a current gen ultra-low cost cpu. You are still substantially over that, but they retail for under $200.
Why does it matter? Computers are so overpowered these days. The companies want to force you to upgrade to keep making money, but that doesn’t mean you have to play along. 25% the performance should still be able to run many things fine. It’s not like apps and websites are 4x better these days to justify a new investment.
It’s just planned obsolescence. If you can work around it and keep using what you have, that’s so much less wasteful.
I’m still not sure why so many people are so dead set against upgrading to Windows 11. It is not like we are talking about Vista or ME here, Windows 11 has worked perfectly well for me on an over 5 year old computer at this point. Maybe it is just disliking change for change’s sake. The way I see it, nothing is meant to last forever, and technology advances fast so might as well adapt to keep up.
I think the biggest complaint I see is that you are pretty much required to set up a Microsoft account to use Windows 11. Technically there is a way to do it without setting up an account, but (1) it is a real pain in the butt and (2) it’s buggy and some things don’t work properly without a Microsoft account. For people who don’t want to use a Microsoft account, it’s a deal-breaker.
My answer to that is to use Linux. If you are so dead set against Microsoft, don’t use their OS. You can’t really have it both ways.
But yes, Windows 11 has been really good, my machine runs better with the same hardware on 11 than it did on 10.