In the last two months, I've retired two desktops that had been running Windows 7. They both had AMD XP 3200+ single core processors and 2GB RAM. Up until sometime in early 2016, they ran well. But the burden of so many updates of all types began to catch up with them and made them unusable. I reinstalled 7 on both and as long as I ran them with no updates other than SP1 they were fine. Fully updating them bogged them down all over again. Given their age, and the fact their CPUs did not allow Windows 10, it was time to gut them and recycle the old junk. The same sort of thing happened to my son's laptop: Windows 7 just bogged it down when fully patched. It did upgrade to Windows 10 and now it runs quite fast. But as time passes, it too will most likely become unusable. New computers with lots of RAM and appropriate processors running Windows 7 is fine. But sooner or later, 7 will go the way of ME, 2000, Vista and etc. Once Microsoft stops making Windows 7, the fat lady starts singing. I liked Windows 7. But sooner or later I get this tremendous headache from banging my head against a wall. Sometimes you just need to cut your loses and move on. In the end, Linux, MacOS, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10 and etc. are just somebody's idea of a newfangled aggravating OS ... and they're all aggravating. Pick your poison sort of thing, but paying a new price to get a soon to be discontinued OS is not my idea of good value. As is the usual case, YMMV.
What in the world does "usage over the years" mean? I'd assume everything in existence gets "usage over the years". As to what's going on with my machines ... just my opinion bro; take it or leave it.
Usage over the years can relate to hardware aging/wearing, software clogging, etcetc... I really don't get the reaction...
Windows 7 will be a much worse beast for Microsoft to slay, compared to XP, because unlike what 7 was for XP, 10 doesn't really do much compared to 7... The only new features that would make people more interested, such as the improved Task Manager and better resource usage were all introduced in Windows 8! And background scrolling exists in 8.1, through a hidden registry key! The new stuff Microsoft is adding to 10 doesn't add any sort of value for a lot of people (Edge now supports Ink on websites, Windows Ink let's you take notes?, new Emojiis!!!!!!, more apps, new icons, new Paint app!...) The privacy and intrusion concerns will keep a lot of people in Windows 7, not to mention enterprises. My 2¢
It's possible that one of Microsoft's Microcode updates may be gumming things up. You might try not installing any of them, but install everything else. Maybe Abbodi can tell us something about them, and whether or not it's possible that they may break an older CPU.
I just find it a load of bull that you can't run win7 on kabylake. it works fine. I've not had any issues running Win7 on a Z270 mainboard using an M.2 PCIe ssd.
My HP from the turn of the century works without a problem... Two 1GB ram replace the one 526er, and an SSD just replaced the 80GB HDD. It fully updated and runs like hell, given that it uses an Intel M ... you did not install SSDs?