I sure hope you're not reading this on a Windows 7 computer right now. At one minute after midnight this morning, Mozilla officially stopped their extended support for v.115, causing the moon to come crashing down on Windows 7 (and 8, I guess, but who uses Windows 8?), darkening it for all time. Well, actually, as I say on the homepage, this website has no tracking, no fingerprinting, no corporate feudal chicanery of any kind, so you're probably safe here (someone might break Neocities' encryption and attempt to have everyone's websites serve malware, but that's pretty remote); and, as others have pointed out, technically Win7's "zero-day forever" began in 2020 when Microsoft terminated extended-support for it, and we've been taking our lives into our own hands, bringing our Win7 machines onto the internet like we'd been doing for the past 4 years—but Firefox's incredibly tough exterior, lacking in any sort of soft underbelly, protected us from everything except viruses that we would willingly install on our machines ourselves by not exercising common sense with scene releases of games and sketchy emulator launchers (and explicit corporate trackware like Google Earth and EA Desktop).
As I've said, I can't fully supplant Windows 7 with Linux Mint because my studio runs on Windows 7 exclusively and I can't be bothered to figure out how to configure everything in Wine or track down Linux versions of all my software. I don't know what I'm going to do in case of a disaster so catastrophic that it destroys my ability to use Win7 for all time, but so long as I don't get laughed out of the computer repair shop, I'll keep my studio computer running for as long as I'm alive.
I've done a lot on that computer. I got it in 2013 when I revamped my home office with $5000 I got from a class-action lawsuit. I was able to afford a printer (the first I'd had since our old Lexmark broke down in 2005), a chair, and a computer. Actually, what I bought was a Windows 8 computer, but Windows 8 wasn't being very obliging about installing certain kinds of software back then, so I returned it to the store and they gave me the option of replacing it with a Windows 7 machine instead. Since the OEM was trying to clear out all their Win7 computers to make space for the Win8 ones, I managed to get a $250 discount, so I only spent $550 on a kickin' gaming computer with a slightly out-of-date operating system.
Incidentally, that's the point where I realised the value in one-generation-obsolete electronics. The brand-new Windows OS refused to even run The Sims 2 back then, where the previous iteration did everything my Windows XP laptop could do and more, for far less money. At long last, I was able to play all my emulators, The Sims 2, and The Sims 3 at 100% (The Sims 4 hadn't been released yet), not have to worry about running out of disk storage, and I could even print my ridiculous "No Parking" signs.
Apart from gaming, I also used my new computer for graphic design. I had established my type foundry, total FontGeek, on my XP laptop, but I couldn't use PaintFont because I hadn't had a printer. Technically, I didn't need a whole new computer for that, and, indeed, for the first couple of weeks in my new studio, I did use XP to print and scan PaintFont templates, but the Windows 7 computer made it faster and easier. My laptop had less than a gigabyte of RAM where my new desktop had 8 GB, expandable to 16 (32 might be the low-end norm for 2024, but this was 2013). Eventually, I got too busy with school to carry on with TFG, and I had to stop doing that. But by then, I was also writing music a lot more; I'd figured out how to use my Fantom X's step-sequencer and I became unstoppable! I wrote about 12 songs for The Sims, which ended up being most of Myshuno, and recorded them all using Audacity 2.0.6 on Windows 7—a workflow I still use to this day.
I did have a bit of an issue with random bluescreening in the early days; it turned out that, when the UPS guy accidentally dropped the box with the computer in it en route up the stairs here, he knocked one of the RAM sticks out of alignment so it wasn't seated properly in the DIMM bus anymore. It took about 6 months on back-and-forth with tech support to figure out what the problem was, and then it turned out the RAM wasn't working properly anyway, so they had to send me a new one. I learned more about computers in the first year of owning my own desktop computer than I ever did in my life up to that point. Oh, sure, I'd been using computers, but using and understanding are 2 completely different things.
The bit of Windows 7 where I'm using it as a digital audio workstation didn't happen until fairly recently. Technically, the version of FL Studio I'm using (20.9) isn't stated to be compatible with Windows 7, but it runs fine. I imagine they didn't think anyone was still using 7, so they left it out of their compatibility chart and started with 8 instead. The thing preventing me switching over to Linux Mint full-time on my studio computer is all my VSTi plugins (the "i" in "VSTi" stands for "instrument", so all the patch libraries and everything). I said once that you could probably convince E-MU Emulator X3 to run in Wine, but I don't know if I can get the whole studio working on Mint to the point where I can load FLP files generated on Windows 7 and be able to work on them without encountering errors, and I can't run the risk that it won't. I'm fairly confident in my ability to run The Sims 1-4, all of my emulators, and probably also MS Office 2010 (I use Powerpoint a lot) on Mint—the only question is FL Studio. At some point, I may have to look into it, but for right now, my middle-aged Windows 7 computer runs it just fine. Windows 7 doesn't have any of the new-age corporate feudal entropy accellerators in it, like Microsoft Defender's antimalware service that runs constantly and takes up a proportional 65% of the system resources, designed to wear out the parts and require me to get a new computer. The heatsink fans rattle a bit, but they still run, and I can get them fixed if I need to. The CPU is healthy, the RAM is too, and I just nullified the computer's ability to contract malware.
I've done a lot with my old Win7 studio computer, and I'm going to do a lot more with it, too. Just not online.