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

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

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.

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

Yes Bob, your retelling of history is basically correct. As is the case with Apple, product releases follow a fairly predictable path: year one = major release of all new product. Year two = minor facelift update to add functionality to basically same product. Year three = major update adding major new functionality and features. Year four = minor facelift only etc.

In that sequence, Windows 7 was a major new OS that pretty much removed the MS-DOS underlying operating system running the show under the hood of XP/Vista and Windows 2000/Server. W7 also combined the two development streams of XP and NT under the one product to do both jobs. ie. Windows 7 didn't have separate streams for home computing and network environments. It did both.

When Microsoft tried to minor facelift W7 into W8 however, they did so in such a way as to COMPLETELY change its look and feel. So dramatic and comprehensive was the change from what everyone was familiar with into something more akin to a tile based Apple Mac GUI, that there was massive backlash. Windows users simply didn't know how to use their computers anymore. There was no taskbar, no START button, no programs list menu. Some people couldn't even figure out how to turn their computers on anymore, and turning them off was a joke. Windows 8.1 was the very hastily rushed out facelift upgrade of Windows 8 to restore some of the familiar look and feel of Windows 7 again so people could at least know how to use their computers again. Thus Windows 8 has become the much unloved forgotten version of Windows no-one uses, like Vista/Server before it.

Thus Windows 7 was the last of the traditional, familiar, non-spyware Microsoft operating systems. Windows 8 and 8.1 can basically be ignored as experimental facelift versions M$ tried on their customers to see how much resistance there would be to a wholesale GUI remap and whether or not people would accept not knowing where any of their computer controls were anymore. You can see how popular 8 & 8.1 were from this website:

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/windows/desktop/worldwide

In short, they are almost as uncomonly used these days as XP, which is a significantly older OS.

With Windows 10, Microsoft changed tack completely and realised they could make more money selling their OS user data to advertisers and marketeers than they had been selling the OS directly to the users as had been the case with all versions of Windows before it. Thus Windows 10 became 'free' to install, but of course, it's just the trojan horse to get you to install it. Once installed, it silently data scrapes you constantly and sends that information back to Microsoft under something called innocently enough Microsoft telemetry, which is of course sold as benefitting you the user in greater security, enhanced features and usability, greater privacy (which is hugely ironic, since privacy is exactly what it destroys), and basically anything else you need to hear to feel good about your decision to install it in the first place. Don't ask questions, just trust Microsoft and be happy is the message.

Hello Dibrom: Thanx for the very interesting "history lesson" and Windows version comparisons. I am impressed and wonder how you learned all this good "stuff" - plz explain.

Also I remember when Win 10 was first announced by M$. Online users were swamped with uncontrollable # of ads urging us to switch to their "latest & greatest" OS. Someone precisely called it their "nag screen".  Apparently M$ finally realized that their potential customers for Win 10 had enuff annoying interruption and turned off the fire hose.

BTW: I told an IT manager today that I was still very satisfied running Win 7 without any problems or known security breaches. He falsely claimed that no security updates were being released by M$ but obviously that is false since almost every week I download 2 "important" OS patches - (1) " Security Essentials"  (2) "Malware Removal Tool".  By faithfully downloading these 2 items and also running Malwarebytes (compatible with Security Essentials) I'm still running VENERABLE WIN 7 successfully. If some day I am forced to abandon it, Linux will probably be its replacement. But hopefully that day will never come.

With Onedrive not supporting 7 I think Dropbox have missed a trick. Many like me ditched Onedrive and installed Dropbox only to discover that Dropbox is bending over backwards to ape Onedrive. My main computer is 10, secondary is 7, plus updated Android. I will NOT change 7 for the benefit of Dropbox, Google, or any other company that rides roughshod over the requirements of users.

This "better performance and security enhancements"  that make it 'incompatible' is a blind - a ruse to conceal the fact that companies don't want to waste time 'supporting' an older OS. I don't need a 'better performance' from Dropbox, and the unrestricted files in my Dropbox folder need no 'security enhancements'.

Same sentiments. I used to like & use dropbox a lot, but it's finally over for me too. I'm phasing it out. Here's my issues:

• Killing Windows Server support altogether (even for latest versions, e.g., my srv 2022 which is Win10-like engine), and with no prior notice (while all that spamming about space etc. goes on).
• Client limit to only 3 devices. I suppose we should say "thanks" for keeping any old ones unaffected...
• Lack of a cheap paid plan, e.g., in the 20-30 Euro/year range, that increases/bypasses the device restriction above and/or adds functionality. (The "Extra" plan takes your Basic account up to 50 GB, which is fair [Google gives 100 GB for same cost], but all the other features are the same.)

Hi. I am using Windows 10. I am getting Dropbox popup for past few days that "Dropbox is removing support for Windows 7,8,& 8.1. Why am I getting this with only option is to Exit dropbox as per attached. Pl fix the issue to stop spamming Win 10 and above users.

screenshot 

Hi Clive48, it is possible that you have the Dropbox desktop application running in compatibility mode on Windows 10?

We have the same issue using Windows Server 2019. Dropbox cannot be started anymore.. What can we do!?