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invictius

Win 7 users, what's your plan come end of the year?

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7 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

 

Yes, precisely that.

 

 

 

Actually, for software development I'd take Visual Studio any day of the week. I'm still waiting for the day that there is a functioning and fully featured integrated debugger available on Posix platforms. No, GDB and LLDB don't really cut it, I haven't seen any good GUI wrapper around them - but for debugging a good GUI enviroment is absolutely essential.

 

 

With a modern web browser you sometimes really need 16 GB. I have 8 and it's virtually impossible to play games while the browser is open.

4 GB is definitely not enough anymore these days

 

Nobody needs 16 GB of RAM to run a Linux desktop and play Doom like the poster who is asking me wants to. Considering they are running hardware that old they're obviously not trying to run the most modern stuff.

 

I just replaced a desktop that had a Core 2 Quad Q9400, 8 GB DDR2, and a 650ti video card and that thing was more than fast enough. The only reason I replaced it was because I started using a 4K TV as a monitor and that old video card wasn't modern enough to drive 4K a 60hz.

 

Hell, my new computer only has 8 GB of DDR4 and I have yet to come across a task it can't handle. Linux is orders of magnitude more efficient when it comes to resources than Windows.

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10 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

Simple, imagine a system where half the software you use has no acceptable equivalent and another quarter only has second grade substitutes. At least that's the case for me.

 

 

Don't blame the kernel for the programs chosen by the distributions. Distros can have poor choices, and yes, I hate some of the things some distros make me run. But there are so many options, always, that one does not simply judge them all from just a few.

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3 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

4MB

 

Feels like the '90s again.

 

I'm now curious to see what running Chrome on such hardware would lead to (insta-crash/BSOD me thinks). Yes I know that was supposed to be GB.

 

Speaking of "how much RAM do you really need for browsers", this video should provide some information. Older version (and only about Chrome) but it still stands. Likely varies from browser to browser but anyway:

 

 

3 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

no filters installed

 

What kind of "filters" ?

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In response to the XP machine discussion:

 

Like I've said before, you're asking for trouble having old machines floating around the internet, and I use OpenVAS and Greenbone to secure this statement. Run OpenVAS in your home environment and see just how many exploitable CVEs you have. There are certain cases where running an old OS is the only thing you can do; in the case of special equipment or software. A lot of companies are stuck on these old systems because they rely on equipment that uses software that was never made to run on later Windows OS versions, but these systems should still remain offline. This is coming from someone who went through a ransomware attack and learned a very hard lesson.

 

I'm freaking out slightly about my job. It's my responsibility to upgrade 300+ machines here to Windows 10 by November.

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12 minutes ago, R4L said:

This is coming from someone who went through a ransomware attack and learned a very hard lesson.

 

I also have a friend who got hijacked cca. 2015 on an XP machine and it was horrible. Thankfully he got his most important "stuff" (won't go into details, but you can speculate) back, but that's an experience you don't want to live. We both used to ignore warnings about using outdated software on the web, thinking that it's just scare-talk and paranoia... till one of us experienced the consequences. That made both of us more cautious and responsible. It was a fucking nightmare.

 

12 minutes ago, R4L said:

I'm freaking out slightly about my job. It's my responsibility to upgrade 300+ machines here to Windows 10 by November.

 

Do keep me up to date on this. I wanna know how many of them will face issues, just to see how much of the "bruhhhhh W10 is unstable spyware BS" is plain nonsense. 300+ machines to put to test after all.

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37 minutes ago, R4L said:

This is coming from someone who went through a ransomware attack and learned a very hard lesson.

How the hell did you got the ransomware? Sketchy Email? Drive-by downloads?

 

Also, for anyone still planning to keep XP on the internet: Never use stuff like emails, online banking etcetra on it. Use them in Windows 10. Focus your efforts on avoiding sketchy websites as much as possible, stick to trustworthy websites and if possible, find a way to disable drive-by downloads.

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14 hours ago, KillPixel said:

switch to linux.

That's like having a pain in your foot and amputating it.

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@Graf Zahl

I just don't like exaggerations. Throwing caution to the wind? Writing off any warning as FUD? That is a straw-man argument. I differentiate between warnings based on concrete, obvious scenarios (e.g., leaving your house for work with the front door wide open is a bad idea) versus insinuations of some obscure threats, which is also often exaggerated (e.g., if you dare connect your Windows XP machine to the internet even for 10 minutes, it's exactly as if you left your front door open for a week!) Before you accuse me of using straw-man arguments myself - yes, I know you did not say that, but I often encounter such analogies when cyber-security comes up.

 

XP is also not "easy to crack". That's another gross exaggeration. Something that's easy to crack is, well, for example, MAC address filtering or WEP protection on home routers. That is something that any script kiddy can do in 2 minutes. XP is far from that. Let us not forget that in addition to the out-of-band patches for serious vulnerabilities, any XP system with POSReady registry hack has been eligible for receiving security patches all the way till April 2019, not to mention the 13 years of hardening between 2001 and the official EOL in 2014.

 

Someone who is tech-savvy and security-conscious would have made his WinXP system pretty secure by now. Someone who is not, can leave even the most modern OS unpatched and vulnerable due to bad practices. This matters more and IMO it's better to educate users on good practices than to instill false sense of security (running a supported OS makes you safe). However, that's a never-ending argument. :)

 

@Cacodemon345

I can't answer for him, but I can tell you how one of my PCs got infected by ransomware a few years ago: I let my parents use it unsupervised for a few weeks. I have no idea what they did. Probably using Internet Explorer with no ad-blocker browsing shady websites (I never used IE back then so I didn't bother installing an ad-blocker on it). I learned a few valuable lessons from that experience myself, even though, fortunately, not a single important piece of data was lost (it was a backup of a backup computer).

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A lot of paranoid people here are forgetting the most important step to staying safe: don't be stupid on the web. This applies as far back as the beginning of the Internet. There have always been nasty viruses and such. Staying up to date does not keep you safe in itself.

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2 minutes ago, Nevander said:

A lot of paranoid people here are forgetting the most important step to staying safe: don't be stupid on the web. This applies as far back as the beginning of the Internet. There have always been nasty viruses and such. Staying up to date does not keep you safe in itself.

 

I always say to my customers that the best weapon against viruses is common sense.

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3 hours ago, Gustavo6046 said:

 

Don't blame the kernel for the programs chosen by the distributions. Distros can have poor choices, and yes, I hate some of the things some distros make me run. But there are so many options, always, that one does not simply judge them all from just a few.

 

I don't blame the kernel but the general lack of the things I need.

MacOS only fares marginally better, you can get stuff, but there's only commercial solutions for too many things.

 

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Available software depend on the distribution of Linux. Most of the time, better solutions exist; so many people are in the open-source community that there is an endless amount of projects to cherry-pick. You're blaming the whole domain of Linux-based Operating Systems just because the one you used didn't have the tools you would want.

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Most people have at least one Linux device in their home, even if they don't know it.

 

Android

Google Chrome OS (Chromebooks)

Amazon Fire OS

LG WebOS (their smart TV interface)

Samsung Tizen (their smart TV interface)

Roku OS

Steam OS

 

All running on the Linux kernel. 

 

If you're in a specific line of work or you're a dedicated PC gamer, Linux probably can't be your only OS. But for the majority of people in a day to day situation, the major desktop Linux distributions are more than fine. Ubuntu (or Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu MATE, Xubuntu), Linux Mint, MX Linux, Manjaro, Sabayon, etc are all very user friendly and complete out of the box. If you're a little more advanced then stuff like Debian, Slackware, Fedora, Arch Linux, etc. 

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14 minutes ago, Gustavo6046 said:

Available software depend on the distribution of Linux. Most of the time, better solutions exist; so many people are in the open-source community that there is an endless amount of projects to cherry-pick. You're blaming the whole domain of Linux-based Operating Systems just because the one you used didn't have the tools you would want.

 

Software that doesn't exist, simply doesn't exist, regardless of distro. Is it so hard to understand that some software only exists on Windows, and if you are lucky for macOS? So where's my Paint.NET on Linux, for example? Yes, right, I'd have to use Wine. Might as well stick to Windows then.

 

 

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4 hours ago, Cacodemon345 said:

How the hell did you got the ransomware? Sketchy Email? Drive-by downloads?

 

Once someone has an in, they can do whatever they want. The possibilities start growing in numbers for every layer of security they can get past. All of my win 7 machines were patched, a few XP machines were in the process of being retired because we had finally moved to a different software that didn't need XP anymore.

 

But all it takes is one person with an email. You can do user training all you want, but if someone is having a bad day or is overtired because of whatever reason, they make mistakes.

 

Let me tell you, rebuilding a few servers from backups isn't too bad (we lost a month of work), but re-imaging 300+ machines is a fucking nightmare. The entire time this is happening, the company is losing money because they can't properly do business, nevermind that they're still paying people to be there and work, and I'm losing my mind because the to-do list grows miles long in seconds and priority gets harder and harder to keep track of for these tasks. I was there at 5am until about 2am for a week straight, catching an hour of sleep if I could sleep every night. It was a fucking nightmare and I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.

 

Should you worry about ransomware at home? Maybe not. Depends on how much you value your things. But at a small business level it's something I hope I never go through ever again. I'm glad I have good backups.

 

As for the whole "Windows 10 is spyware" thing, debloat it and get rid of the telemetry and other shit. It speeds it up a lot, and actually makes Win 10 a lot nicer to use. Want a Win 7 look? Just use Classic Shell.

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5 hours ago, jeroa said:

What are some internet do's and do not's for staying safe in the webs?

Warez sites and porno sites give your computer STDs, that’s a safe one to keep in mind.

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Oh yeah i was going to mention computer updates. I heard that on Win 10 that you can't just choose to install "important updates" like you could on past OS's (such as Win 7). Is this true? If so, that would be quite a pain as i hate getting huge updates all the time which require a restart (which thankfully doesn't happen much on Win 7 anymore).

 

I mean, don't get me wrong, updates are fine. It's just nice to be able to choose what's more "important" at the current moment (unless they are all important).

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1 hour ago, CyberDreams said:

Oh yeah i was going to mention computer updates. I heard that on Win 10 that you can't just choose to install "important updates" like you could on past OS's (such as Win 7). Is this true? If so, that would be quite a pain as i hate getting huge updates all the time which require a restart (which thankfully doesn't happen much on Win 7 anymore).

 

I mean, don't get me wrong, updates are fine. It's just nice to be able to choose what's more "important" at the current moment (unless they are all important).

 

Newer versions of Windows 10 have much finer control over when and how updates are installed - arguably more so than Windows 7. You can pause them for seven days and also set "Active hours" so that it won't bother you about updates say during your main work hours.

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Just now, Doomkid said:

Warez sites and porno sites give your computer STDs, that’s a safe one to keep in mind.

by warez do you mean pirating software or any type of piracy site? i frequently watch cartoons on pirate sites, is that a security no-no?

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Just now, jeroa said:

by warez do you mean pirating software or any type of piracy site? i frequently watch cartoons on pirate sites, is that a security no-no?

 

It is not an absolute guarantee you will get problems, but yes those types of sites are a bit of a security mine field. They support themselves with the help of ad networks from, shall we say, questionable sources. I would not go on one without decent security software and your BS detector tuned to maximum.

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5 hours ago, Doomkid said:

Warez sites and porno sites give your computer STDs, that’s a safe one to keep in mind.

 

You definitely have to be extremely careful. It's not so much the websites themselves that cause problems but the things you download from them.

In general, if something comes in a self-extracting archive for no good reasons - avoid at all costs!

 

Most of the time they are infected and in fact the only reason the item you want to download is even available. Most people who upload content on these sites are not enthusiasts doing it for fun (as questionable as that even is, but for certain rare items I can understand it) but for serious money, and since we are talking about illegal activities to begin with, the route to active sabotage is short.

 

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Rule #1. Use an ad-blocker. If you want to turn it off for some specific sites you trust, that's fine, but default should be on.

Rule #2. Everything that Graf said. If you like looking for warez / pirated content, then you have to develop a good sense of what's safe and what's not, and that comes with experience. If you don't engage in such "shady" activities, things are simpler. The same goes for pornography, by the way.

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12 hours ago, CyberDreams said:

Oh yeah i was going to mention computer updates. I heard that on Win 10 that you can't just choose to install "important updates" like you could on past OS's (such as Win 7). Is this true? If so, that would be quite a pain as i hate getting huge updates all the time which require a restart (which thankfully doesn't happen much on Win 7 anymore).

 

I mean, don't get me wrong, updates are fine. It's just nice to be able to choose what's more "important" at the current moment (unless they are all important).

Don't listen to people, they're all retarded. Especially the "fuck W10 it's evil spyware made by the deepstate" schizophrenic crowd.

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My sad and slow laptop (Celeron 1.4GHz + Intel HD Baytrail + 2GB RAM) is far too garbage to run Windows 10 well. Also, no proper drivers are available to run Win10 with all of this laptop's features, so i really doubt i'm upgrading. Not only that, but many of the programs i use don't work properly in Windows 10.

 

And this Windows 7 is actually Windows 7 Lite so i pretty much stopped recieving updates a while ago (This is Service Pack 1 AFAIR)

 

I also have Linux, but i very rarely use it because GL performance absolutely sucks there (Playing Counter-Strike 1.6 at 120fps? Too bad! Enjoy these 20fps :)

 

I don't care at all about modern games, since i can't run them in here anyways. Though if they manage to get Doom 2016 running in GL 3.3 with at minimum 2fps then i'll upgrade, if only to play the best slideshow of my life! The most modern not-indie game i can play here at high settings is Modern Warfare 2, and that's from like 2009. Still a good game though, but it shows the kind of trash PC i'm stuck with right now.

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Coincidentally, I just upgraded a bunch of old laptops to Windows 10. Dual core, 4GB of RAM and plate drives. They're sluggish but not any more than they were running Win7.

 

You can mitigate that a bit - moving the swap file to a 2nd drive, tweaking performance settings - but aside from the ability to turn off updates (which only an idiot would do) there is little advantage to using Windows 7. It was a good OS ten years ago. It's outlived its usefulness.

 

Everyone complains about the privacy settings. They can all be turned off. You won't spend any more time tweaking Win10 than you did any previous version of Windows.

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On 9/11/2019 at 6:00 AM, CyberDreams said:

Oh yeah i was going to mention computer updates. I heard that on Win 10 that you can't just choose to install "important updates" like you could on past OS's (such as Win 7). Is this true? If so, that would be quite a pain as i hate getting huge updates all the time which require a restart (which thankfully doesn't happen much on Win 7 anymore).

 

I mean, don't get me wrong, updates are fine. It's just nice to be able to choose what's more "important" at the current moment (unless they are all important).

 

I didn't see an "important updates only" setting (didn't look too hard though), but I can say that from my experience 10 is much less intrusive with updates. Remember how you'd need to go to work/university with your laptop, but Windows would start installing updates without even asking you, and you'd be late because it took like half an hour? I haven't had that situation on Windows 10 at all (I also have it on my work laptop in addition to my gaming rig). It actually asks you before installing and usually offers to postpone the installation for something like 5 days, and you can also go to settings and tell it to stop doing updates altogether for a limited time (up to somewhat arbitrary 35 days).

Edited by Rathori

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Seriously, the only genuine advantage of Windows 7 today is its visual design. I do not really understand why Microsoft is so uptight with officially allowing to skin Windows. One little change and most people would be happy.


But from a technical side, just like things went with XP, Windows 7's core is old. It was written for a different breed of hardware than what is available today and thinking that its shelf life can be infinitely extended is just make-believe.

 

The current trend doesn't look good - last month on Steam's hardware survey 7 took a steep drop of 1.47 percentage points. A few more of this magnitude and it'll be below 10% some time early next year.

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2 hours ago, Rathori said:

I didn't see an "important updates only" setting (didn't look too hard though), but I can say that from my experience 10 is much less intrusive with updates. Remember how you'd need to go to work/university with your laptop, but Windows would start installing updates without even asking you, and you'd be late because it took like half an hour? I haven't had that situation on Windows 10 at all (I also have it on my work laptop in addition to my gaming rig). It actually asks you before installing and usually offers to postpone the installation for something like 5 days, and you can also go to settings and tell it to stop doing updates altogether for a limited time (up to somewhat arbitrary 35 days).

 

Postphoning updates depends on your edition though. Home didn't have an option to postphone monthly updates until version 1903. But you're right otherwise, there's more control over them than people give it credit for (likely because of MS' aggressive campaign of forcing people to upgrade). You can postphone them, set your PC not to update over metered connections, and not to restart during active hours, which you can configure.

 

14 hours ago, -TDRR- said:

My sad and slow laptop (Celeron 1.4GHz + Intel HD Baytrail + 2GB RAM) is far too garbage to run Windows 10 well. Also, no proper drivers are available to run Win10 with all of this laptop's features, so i really doubt i'm upgrading. Not only that, but many of the programs i use don't work properly in Windows 10.

 

I feel your pain. I got rid of a single core toaster I was stuck with for almost a decade 3 years ago. Needless to say it could not even play HD videos in a media player before I got rid of it, and forget about gaming, games like Unreal Gold would only run well as long as there was little to no action on screen. Particle effects? More like slideshow effects, instant 5fps for ya. Running newer versions of Office? Good joke, if it managed to load before the end of the century... It was not fun at all.

 

3 hours ago, Bucket said:

Everyone complains about the privacy settings. They can all be turned off. You won't spend any more time tweaking Win10 than you did any previous version of Windows.

 

This. Perhaps a few more minutes to turn off some extra stuff such as background apps and remove some bloatware from Store, but that's as much time you can waste.

 

17 hours ago, FractalBeast said:

Don't listen to people, they're all retarded. Especially the "fuck W10 it's evil spyware made by the deepstate" schizophrenic crowd.

 

I usually try to avoid insulting others but honestly, I have real difficulty in doing this here. Some people just want to complain, especially when this complaint is alone, and not accompanied by anything else. It's all the more ridiculous if it's coming from people who use services or products from companies that are far more intrusive than MS ever is or was with Windows, such as Google and Facebook. MS is also fully transparent about what they collect as well, and every user on a newer version than 1803 (I think it was this one which introduced the advanced Diagnostics & Feedback feature) can see exactly what is being collected. Granted it's raw code so the average Joe will probably not understand much, but for those who do and care, it's there for them to see (oh, and even delete from the cloud). Give MS a break when it comes to privacy...

 

2 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

But from a technical side, just like things went with XP, Windows 7's core is old. It was written for a different breed of hardware than what is available today and thinking that its shelf life can be infinitely extended is just make-believe.

 

Indeed, there's only so much you can do with the old, at some point you have to kill it and move on to create something new, more modern, and advanced. But I think some people just hate change tbh. When XP came out, people complained. When Vista came out, people complained. When 8(.1) came out, people complained (see the pattern?) Sure, there's always been legitimate concerns and problems, but that's not my point here. Some just hate something because it's not the old thing they got so used to.

Edited by seed

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