The Dropbox desktop application will no longer be supported for Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 on October 22nd

Looking back at "ancient history" Microsoft (for some unknown reason and apparently no pre-release user survey) went from venerable old Windows 7 to apparently unacceptable Win 8 which was quickly replaced by Win 8.1 to correct design defects in 8.0.   But instead of acknowledging that 8.1 was less than robust and not an improvement over Win 7, Microsoft skipped Win 9 and went directly to Win 10 and then to Win 11. I often wonder abt today's environment if a hypothetical Win 9 had in fact been designed to build on the reliable features of familiar Win 7. Only very minor changes could have been made that would have avoided the distrust in and relearning required by its latest versions that apparently ignore the success of VENERABLE  WINDOWS 7.

Bewildered Bob

Windows 7 computers are indirectly immune from the outage because Falcon Sensor by Crowdstrike, much like Dropbox is soon to be, is not compatible or unsupported in a Windows 7 environment. Therefore it can't be run on a W7 computer and therefore that Windows 7 computer is unaffected and still perfectly reliable.

This is why all the BSOD vision in the media is showing the W10/11 flavour BSOD with the childish 😞 emoji thing on the blue screen. You don't see a single screen with the W7 BSOD because they haven't failed.

Interesting too that the 'solution' being bandied around involves booting into safe mode, which is coincidentally very hard to force a computer running W10/11 to do. Those OSes in line with their mantra to remove as much user control as possible and make everything automated, have no key press combo you can use to force safe mode and the option to boot that way isn't presented on the post driver install boot screen. When trapped in an endless boot loop cycle, apparently the only thing you can do is to let the computer reboot itself 15 times in succession, at which point the software supposedly realises by itself that it is completely f*cked and will then boot itself into safe mode. You hope.

Yep, that's real progress over Windows 7 right there. So much easier than just holding down the SHIFT key through the boot process to get into safe mode.  And then of course if the system hard drive is bitlocker encrypted (as all corporate owned or leased machines will be because no company trusts their own employees not to fiddle and tinker anymore), then the problem becomes a whole lot more otherworldly complex, difficult and time consuming.

Apparently Dropbox software was NOT the cause of the outage so in my humble opinion there will be no change in their announced withdrawal of support for Win 7. Do y'all agree ?

Bewildered Bob

Sadly, no. The (massively complex and user onerous) "solution" to your dilemma you're about to face head on, is that what you're 'supposed' to do is spend huge $$$ buying an all new top range computer that can handle Windows 11, then you run an emulator version of Windows 7 inside that W11 environment so your hardware can still run your Windows 7 software that has no drivers compatible with W10/11.

So now you have not one simple OS to maintain, but TWO OSes to maintain, one of which is constantly spying on everything you do, just so you can keep doing what you were happily doing perfectly well with your previous 10yo reliable computer running just W7.

I'm sorry to say, this is the new world order or how things work. There are many examples. EV's are another one. First you needlessly create a massive problem through (in this case) enforced software incompatibility sold to the users through the blatant lie of "security" and "privacy" and any other nonsense you can come up with and convince people to believe. Then you sell them the all new, massively overly complex and pointlessly expensive solution that best case, gets them back to where they were before the fake problem that never needed to exist in the first place was foisted upon them.

QED: Dropbox sells its users the idea that for the sake of security and privacy and future feature enhancements, they have to force a compatibility upgrade that will leave 3.71% of their userbase behind. Then they tell us that's really not a problem because all we have to do is upgrade our computers to Windows 10/11, helpfully leaving out the fact that for most, this will mean a complete upheaval of their ENTIRE computer operating ecosphere starting with having to buy all new hardware componentry and in many cases building up everything brand new again from first principals. A process that could cost thousands of $$$ and take many months. At the end of it all, best case is that you end up with a computer setup equivalent to what you had before, except that its constantly spying on you and sending all your usage data back to microsoft to send you targetted advertising. This is the world Dropbox has revealed themselves to be complicit in creating and propagating. After knowing this, it is up to you whether the service they provide is really worth wanting to stay associated with them.

Apparently I am NOT the Lone Ranger who intends to continue running Win 7 despite Dropbox's unfortunate decision to discontinue support soon. It makes no sense to let "the tail wag the dog" by upgrading (?) away from Win 7 to continue using Dropbox. Those folks could help the community by publishing a list of free alternatives that will continue to be supported for Win 7 users who refuse to switch OSes for only one app. Do y'all hear me OK ??

Very Bewildered Bob

I have over $500K of 3D Scanning software & hardware that only runs on Windows 7 (I can NOT afford to update to an inferior Windows version...) Will the existing version Dropbox still continue to work if I do NOT do an upgrade (I'm only using Dropbox for file sharing/storage)

Bleck. Tuning into this thread for the eventual workaround chat.

There should be a number of 3rd party multi-cloud apps that can use dropbox as a backend. None of them integrate with windows as well as dropbox does, but we'll have to find out out the pros and cons eventually now. I've used RaiDrive a bit, since Google Drive stopped caring about win7, and it works decently, though not perfectly. Note that google drive never worked particularly well compared to dropbox, so the challenges and expectations are higher for the dropbox integrations. Note: while companies often like to charge subscriptions for no apparent reason (this would seemingly include RaiDrive), cloud apps are often requiring assistance from the 3rd party app vendor's servers to work around shoddy design in the cloud backends (and this is often intentionally shoddy design, to frustrate bad actors and people like us, none of whom they care about).

I do expect there to be a period of time where it's relatively easy to interfere with dropbox so that it thinks it's running on win10 even when it's not, so they can't shut us off on the server. But eventually they will use some OS services which are not so easy to fake, and it's the integration with OS (filesystem and shell) services that are a principal part of dropbox's value so it's not so easy to just slice out either.

Doubtful, because the very nature of the software's purpose is that it connects to the internet and 'phone's home' all the time in order to do the very thing the tin it comes in says it can do. This means it is constantly checking for and updating itself without user control. There used to be a stripped out version called Dropbox portable, which could even run from USB on computers that were locked down from installing apps like work computers, but Dropbox put an end to that when they decided they would remove the option of preventing updates and took away all user control altogether.

Just google "how do I prevent Dropbox from updating" and you'll see this is a VERY common and wanted question. The answer unfortunately is you can't - at least not without breaking the application entirely such that it no longer works. In this respect, it's the same as Windows 10/11 itself. You can strip all the spyware and telemetry out of Windows 7 relatively easily and make a new installer without all the spyware/bloatware crap, and it works brilliantly - far better in fact than it ever did officially from Microsoft, but you can't do the same thing with Windows 10/11. The telemetry/spyware/data scraping tools are so intrinsic and embedded so deeply within the operating structure of Windows 10/11, that removing them breaks the OS to such an extent that it no longer works as an OS. Exactly the same is true of Dropbox now unfortunately. These are both advertising tools designed to harvest your data and sell it to advertisers ultimately to make money.

Windows 10/11's primary purpose is a data scraping tool for Microsoft. On the back of that basic functionality is an operating system for your MSI/Gigabyte/ASUS whatever MoBo provided as the useful part you need to run your computer as the incentive for installing it, but never forget that the primary purpose and the main reason for the software existing in the first place is to scrape the user's data and feed it back to Microsoft.

As of today, right now (since I just checked), the sum total market share of Windows versions 7 + 8 + 8.1 is only 3.71%. That's how many computers in the world are running those OSes. The simply truth is that Dropbox have made a commercial decision to trash 3.71% of their customers they've determined they can live without and don't need. They can see the numbers for themselves and that's a decision they've made. 3.71% is not a lot and they can obviously survive with a loss of 3.71% of their customer base, so that's what they've decided to do. No amount of pleading or hand wringing will change that. Just switch to their competitors instead. A quick look reveals there are a lot of them.

I hope someone will find a "workaround"-solution for this Dilemma.

Hi earlpurple, I merged you to this post regarding a recent update on the Windows 7 desktop compatibility.