[asimuvPR]

I tune cars as as as a hobby. My current setup is based around windows xp due to driver supports (technically an embedded application). My plan was to upgrade to a windows 8 machine and emulate an xp install. But I'm not going to anymore. I tune while driving and it could be catastrophic to have the machine install updates. I'll continue with the air gapped xp machine. Too bad because I was looking forward to not using a machine that was a hundred years old.

[yrro]

Your decision is the correct one, but I'm pretty sure that no consumer version of Windows has ever shipped without a requirement that you shouldn't use it for real-time/safety-critical purposes.

[asimuvPR]

Well, safety goes out the window when you are tuning a modified 911. :)

[vetinari]

For exactly the same reason I had an XP virtual machine, that I was running at whatever computer I was currently using. Worked like a charm on all host OSes, including Ubuntu for example.

[hackney]

If you would update to 8, which is more of a TS interface with an ap store, why not windows 7? You could have a 64bit OS with a nice quad core+ cpu which is impossible in XP. Then you could virtual machine xp on top of that and have the latest and greatest. XP is rather dated to say the least. The only reason to run it is if you have older hardware such as a pentium 4 single core processor on board.

[asimuvPR]

I believe it also upgrades itself. Not sure. I really don't want to risk it because it could brick t he car's ecu (not cheap).

[Mithaldu]

Welcome to being a victim of sensational misreporting. Win7 does not upgrade itself randomly or without telling you. It will schedule an upgrade, then tell you about it and give you a chance to cancel it beforehand. And using something like https://www.grc.com/never10.htm you can also disable the scheduling.

[pritambaral]

> Win7 does not upgrade itself randomly or without telling you. It will schedule an upgrade, then tell you about it and give you a chance to cancel it beforehand

Technicaly true.

Practically, it will sneakily get a human to eventually let the upgrade in. Just as we've been seeing all around.

[asimuvPR]

Your reply is appreciated. :)

[insickness]

Windows 7 is solid. I had Windows 10 on my laptop and downgraded because it provided zero benefit. There are ways to prevent Windows 7 from from nagging you to upgrade.