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invictius

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

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1 hour ago, CyberDreams said:

I knew this thread would eventually turn into an Apple shittalking fest (not that i currently use any Apple products although i did really like my i-pod back in the day).

 

I was just thinking something...if Apple is so bad why does Romero still use the products? Because he's been using them since the 80's or because they just work well for what he does for a living? I know that he loves Apple. 

 

It's the same old story that can be seen everywhere - people are entrenched into something and it's very hard to get out again. It's also if someone is deeply invested somewhere they tend to dismiss and ignore the issues that are being pointed out by outsiders.

The thing is, for run-of-the-mill users Apple products are not bad, the issues with their computers I have with Apple mainly come from being a developer and constantly feeling the brunt of what they do. Macs are also fine as long as you use them for web development - the really ugly things can only be seen if you have to do long term development for software that targets Apple hardware, especially iOS where they cause a lot of pointless work with their constantly shifting submission requirements and that entire and totally annoying certification and signing process.

 

Aside from that my issues with Apple are on another level - it's not their product I dislike but their corporate attitude. What I see is very much the kind of bully Microsoft was under Ballmer - just on steroids. They are employing the same tactics to hurt the competition, but unlike Microsoft who got constantly criticized for it, people just love Apple and ignore the fact that they are supporting a company that is in a position to do real and permanent harm to the computing market with their strong position in mobile (fortunately not on the desktop or things would be far more dire now.) As a matter of fact, nearly all the bad developments here can be tracked down to something Apple initially invented and were then copied by others when it became clear that it was working.

 

 

 

1 hour ago, CyberDreams said:

About Win 10: I still hate the fact that MS shoved Win 10 down everyone's throat, especially back when it was super buggy. That was total bullshit. Tbh, that's what really made me hate it (besides the fact that i was still somewhat new to Win 7 so i didn't plan on switching anyways). I get they were trying to advertise their new OS but damn...

 

Don't forget that Windows 10 was an emergency exit from a gargantuan miscalculation the former management did with Windows 8, they had to rush it out in order to send a clear sign that things will improve. They essentially had to reset their priorities and work themselves into a forward moving position again. That cannot work without temporary setbacks.

As such, I don't think that their initial upgrade offer to try to rush Windows 7 and 8 users to upgrade was a good thing. The smarter move would have been to say that 7 and 8 are freely upgradable but not attach a limited time window to it. That way everybody could have done the upgrade on their own time schedule.

But I can understand why they wanted to leave Windows 8 behind as quickly as possible. (And yet, on the work machines I had to use back then this migration was a lot less painful than any upgrade of macOS on my current work machine. Every time there's a major upgrade, some stuff breaks, often things I need for work.)

 

The first versions of Windows 10 were indeed very problematic, and unfortunately that memory still lingers - they should have done the versioning differently and not calling it 10, but give each incremental upgrade a dedicated number and each major upgrade a dot behind the 10, so that they can market their improved versions as 10.1, 10.2 and so on. As it is now it's just the same old 10 in the minds of many users, even though we have seen at least 3 major upgrades that by now would have made it Windows 11.

 

 

1 hour ago, CyberDreams said:

I'm sure people who were on 8/8.1 jumped on the Win 10 bandwagon real quick though and i don't blame them from what i've heard about those OS's. Like i stated before, i'll switch to Win 10 Pro when the time comes for me, more than likely with a new build probably sometime next year as i do want to try to build something of higher quality than my first build and since i don't work it tends to take me a longer time to save up money for things such as this than the average person. 

  

 

Windows 8.1 is a really solid OS - the only major problem is the missing start menu - easily fixed by a third party add-on. (8.0 on the other hand is something that's better forgotten.) So I am in the same boat here - I feel no rush to upgrade, I'll migrate to 10 when I buy my next computer. The current one should have 3 years of life left in it.

 

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Another reason why the memories of the old are still alive is that they literally shoved 10 on other people's throats. There was a time when even pressing "X" on the upgrade window on 7 and 8 still resulted in initializing the upgrade process automatically. Upgrading between different versions of 10 was also buggier and more unstable than it is now as MS had never done this before and had no experience, the closest they got in the past were Service Packs, but not even those can compare with full fledged Feature Updates that 10 receives (there's been over 5 major updates at this point by the way - we're on 1903 with 1909 coming soon, and the initial release version was 1507).

 

So, yes, at the time they did in fact deserve the hate for their aggressive push for upgrading, but they've learned their lesson since.

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1 hour ago, CyberDreams said:

I was just thinking something...if Apple is so bad why does Romero still use the products? Because he's been using them since the 80's or because they just work well for what he does for a living? I know that he loves Apple.

I think it's a little bit of both. Apple may have been somewhat different in the early 90s, which is when the guys at id were developing their best and most groundbreaking stuff. Once you are used to something you tend to know how to optimize it, so you like it and it takes a lot to get you to switch.

 

Apple is also not bad. Their products are not bad - they are consistently top-tier. The issue here is there philosophy. The whole walled-garden thing, we'll tell you what you need and how to use the products, etc. If this mindset works for you as a user - you may be in heaven. If it doesn't, well, sucks - because take one step left or right off the main path and you're pretty much fighting hordes of undead zombies just to get to the ice machine.

 

2 hours ago, CyberDreams said:

About Win 10: I still hate the fact that MS shoved Win 10 down everyone's throat, especially back when it was super buggy. That was total bullshit. Tbh, that's what really made me hate it (besides the fact that i was still somewhat new to Win 7 so i didn't plan on switching anyways). I get they were trying to advertise their new OS but damn...

Just advertising is not really the same at shoving it down one's throat (although accidental auto-upgrades have been an issue). Actually the king of shoving things down people's throat is once again... Apple. Good luck dealing with forced upgrades there. If you accidentally click 'OK' on a popup that jumps out of the middle of nowhere, it upgrades and there is no way to downgrade. And if you don't, well - expect your apps to start breaking eventually (talking about iOS ecosystem here, macOS may be different, but I have no experience.

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17 minutes ago, seed said:

So, yes, at the time they did in fact deserve the hate for their aggressive push for upgrading, but they've learned their lesson since.

Agree here. IMO, forced updates is truly the singular worst thing about Windows 10. Losing your work to forced auto-restart, ending up with a broken machine because of a bad update, and even that data deletion fiasco that happened with one version - these are all byproducts of the policy that makes updates automatic and takes them out of your control unless you jump through tons of hoops all the time.

 

I'm not on 1903 yet, so I don't know if it really got better for the Home users there. On Pro I completely disable auto-updates and manage stuff myself.

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13 minutes ago, dr_st said:

Agree here. IMO, forced updates is truly the singular worst thing about Windows 10. Losing your work to forced auto-restart, ending up with a broken machine because of a bad update, and even that data deletion fiasco that happened with one version - these are all byproducts of the policy that makes updates automatic and takes them out of your control unless you jump through tons of hoops all the time.

 

I'm not on 1903 yet, so I don't know if it really got better for the Home users there. On Pro I completely disable auto-updates and manage stuff myself.

 

We can only delay and pause updates now as far as I can tell.

 

Honestly, the forced auto update it itself is not a bad thing. This was done to keep people who refused to install patches in the past secure, in MS' effort to keep everyone up to date. The problem here however, is that bugs are introduced the whole time, and sooner or later a buggy update will make its way onto other people's machines, and good luck after that happens... troubleshooting and fixing what it broke by yourself.

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3 minutes ago, seed said:

Honestly, the forced auto update it itself is not a bad thing. This was done to keep people who refused to install patches in the past secure, in MS' effort to keep everyone up to date.

If they had limited this to security updates only, it would have made more sense in that regard. It was done, I think, mostly to make the lives of MS tech support easier - so that most people are always at the latest version.

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10 minutes ago, dr_st said:

If they had limited this to security updates only, it would have made more sense in that regard. It was done, I think, mostly to make the lives of MS tech support easier - so that most people are always at the latest version.

 

I'm not so sure about that though, since it actually resulted in the exact opposite happening at tech support. If that was the intention, then they didn't think it through.

 

It would've been better if they did this only with security updates, but that's easier said than done. A major improvement on 10 compared to older versions is that the updates are much more streamlined, and all are cumulative, so you no longer end up installing hundreds of updates over the course of a few months or years. Said updates contain both bug fixes and security improvements, they could have split them in 2, theoretically, but I think this would've resulted in needlessly complicating things.

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1 hour ago, Graf Zahl said:

The first versions of Windows 10 were indeed very problematic, and unfortunately that memory still lingers - they should have done the versioning differently and not calling it 10, but give each incremental upgrade a dedicated number and each major upgrade a dot behind the 10, so that they can market their improved versions as 10.1, 10.2 and so on. As it is now it's just the same old 10 in the minds of many users, even though we have seen at least 3 major upgrades that by now would have made it Windows 11.

Like it was in my mind as i don't keep up with the updates (why would i, i don't have Win 10). I guess it is actually better than it was a few years ago.

 

35 minutes ago, dr_st said:

I think it's a little bit of both. Apple may have been somewhat different in the early 90s, which is when the guys at id were developing their best and most groundbreaking stuff. Once you are used to something you tend to know how to optimize it, so you like it and it takes a lot to get you to switch.

True. I agree.

 

40 minutes ago, dr_st said:

Apple is also not bad. Their products are not bad - they are consistently top-tier. The issue here is there philosophy. The whole walled-garden thing, we'll tell you what you need and how to use the products, etc.

Yeah...i see where you're coming from. I've heard about that before. They seem to be pretty good at that i've heard.

 

42 minutes ago, dr_st said:

Just advertising is not really the same at shoving it down one's throat (although accidental auto-upgrades have been an issue). Actually the king of shoving things down people's throat is once again... Apple. Good luck dealing with forced upgrades there. If you accidentally click 'OK' on a popup that jumps out of the middle of nowhere, it upgrades and there is no way to downgrade. And if you don't, well - expect your apps to start breaking eventually (talking about iOS ecosystem here, macOS may be different, but I have no experience.

Jeeze, i didn't know that apple was even worse with that. 

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1 hour ago, dr_st said:

 

Actually the king of shoving things down people's throat is once again... Apple. Good luck dealing with forced upgrades there. If you accidentally click 'OK' on a popup that jumps out of the middle of nowhere, it upgrades and there is no way to downgrade. And if you don't, well - expect your apps to start breaking eventually (talking about iOS ecosystem here, macOS may be different, but I have no experience.

 

MacOS isn't really much better. App breakage with Apple is mostly deliberate, not accidental, unlike with Windows. So you have to be extra careful. It can go both ways: Upgrade and some old stuff will break or don't upgrade and some new stuff won't work. Bad luck if you need a new XCode version and Apple decided again to use it as an upgrade weapon and you haven't upgraded yet. If you cannot schedule this for the night but need the new version ASAP, you'll lose several work hours right away. The same can happen if you accidentally click into such a window. It happened last week with my work iPad. They notified me of the new update, I accidentally clicked on the wrong button and was unable to work for 2 hours.

 

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On 9/12/2019 at 11:57 AM, Graf Zahl said:

 

You want some insight:

 

Buy Apple, you have to use Apple's App Store to buy software. Apple is the sole policing instance that can decide what you are allowed to buy.

Want to do mobile payments with your Apple device? Better hope that the store supports ApplePay - because there's no competition allowed on an iOS device.

Want to buy from iBooks? Congratulations, you now got a product that can only be used on Apple devices thanks to the proprietary DRM, while buying the same thing elsewhere will allow you to use it on any device you want (that is, until Apple decides one day that the Kindle app competes with their own store and blocks it. Remember: Apple can do that on a whim.)

I could go on with a little research, but since I do not use their services I am not the most informed person about their shenanigans in other fields.

 

So yeah, I see a lot of evidence that Apple is all out on controlling their users' behavior.

And now they are also starting a crackdown on "unauthorized" macOS software. As usual, it's being sold as beneficial for the end user, and initially with reduced invasiveness, but it's quite clear where this will head: Apple also wants total control of what people do with their Macs, not just with their phones. If these certification processes become mandatory, Apple can decide all on their own which software to run and which not.

 

 

I won't say that the higherups in Apple want to control their users' behavior, but Apple as a whole (metaphysical) memetic entity, a blind deaf silent information processing structure, certainly gets "driven" to do so due to the Apple corporate philosophy.

 

Which is actually fucking scary when you think about it. Abstract concepts like a company being given the power to filter the information available to people. Toss that on the pile of "proof we're already living in the cyberpunk dystopia".

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This is truly becoming FUD just like every argument in this thread. “What if this terrible thing happened! Let’s react as though it already has!”

 

Centralizing trust is not an awful answer to security threats. It’s one in which active research is going into decentralized alternatives (which of course will probably fire up the anti-blockchain brigade so you can’t win) but in the name of security, some central points of trust are currently necessary whether it’s Certificate Authorities or repositories of signatures for code and/or executables.

 

Apple as a corporation in the capitalist framework is driven purely by profit, I don’t believe in inherent benevolence of corporations, but what is being described here as looming is nonsensical for many reasons, mainly Apple not standing to benefit from making themselves into a late 90s MS target as politicians argue already they should be broken up and the EU has made their stance on technology companies monopolizing things very clear (you can’t even ship Windows with IE there as I understand it).

 

So Apple, worth almost a trillion dollars just selling their products, is not even likely from a greed and capitalism perspective to want to become a monopoly in the eyes of the public and the various regulatory bodies that dictate the rules because of self-preservation. I don’t believe the cut of App Store profits they’d in theory get would be worth it to them relative to their size and the regulatory cost they’d bring upon themselves when they inevitably lose in court at least in the EU and then get the politicians on their back for real attempting an actual takedown.

 

And if GZDoom ever cannot have OS X builds maintained any more by the current maintainer because of code signing issues then I tentatively volunteer to consider doing it so let’s not panic lol

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41 minutes ago, insertwackynamehere said:

 

So Apple, worth almost a trillion dollars just selling their products, is not even likely from a greed and capitalism perspective to want to become a monopoly in the eyes of the public and the various regulatory bodies that dictate the rules because of self-preservation. I don’t believe the cut of App Store profits they’d in theory get would be worth it to them relative to their size and the regulatory cost they’d bring upon themselves when they inevitably lose in court at least in the EU and then get the politicians on their back for real attempting an actual takedown.

 

 

The actual problem is that current monopoly laws are somewhat insufficient to keep those IT behemoths in check because they completely ignore the concept of a vertical monopoly - and that's what Apple has successfully built here - essentially monopolizing their customers in a way that they have few options to choose Apple's competitor's once they have bought into that "ecosystem".

These kinds of business structures are just as dangerous as real monopolies and need to be kept in check. It simply cannot be that by being the only entity that is able to do payment processing on an iPhone, Apple can basically force any business and bank to enter a business agreement with them because they have no choice unless they'd lose Apple users as their own customers. Such scenarios are plain and simply unacceptable, yet they do not seem to reach those who could do something about it.

 

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I will not be running any newer version of Windows on my personal hardware until they go back to making a regular software OS, and not SaaS bullshit loaded down with adware, spyware, and malware right out of the gate. You know, just last month I believe it was an ex-contractor blew the whistle on the fact that Cortana has been recording things it's not supposed to from millions of computers. His job was listening to it. This is what you have in your house, and even if you turn it off in the much-lauded settings, it keeps running always - why is that?

 

I prefer an OS that didn't require a few hours of tweaking settings that pretend to turn off all the phoning home in the first place. Call it paranoia if you want, but it seems to me that everybody has been frog-in-the-potted with this stuff. Back in the 00's people would have thought it was insane if you suggested a mainstream OS would be doing the things that Windows 10 does to its users with impunity.

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Well, I think you better migrate to Linux then. With your mindset you should steer clear of commercial software entirely! :P

 

 

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I do wonder what will happen after W10 eventually goes EOL in 2025, MS has stated a couple of times before that 10 is the last Windows. I still find it funny that some people didn't understand this statement. When MS said "last" they didn't mean "newest/most recent/latest", that was supposed to mean "we're going to stop making new versions of Windows after 10, enjoy it while it lasts". I wonder what will happen after the Windows series eventually goes into the grave.

 

And speaking of telemetry and data collection, I think some people have missed the fact that this has actually increased on older versions of Windows as well, some updates added more of it. I agree that modern software is a lot more intrusive when it comes to privacy these days, but if that is such a huge concern to anyone... you're peobably better off not touching modern software at all.

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Just now, seed said:

I do wonder what will happen after W10 eventually goes EOL in 2025, MS has stated a couple of times before that 10 is the last Windows. I still find it funny that some people didn't understand this statement. When MS said "last" they didn't mean "newest/most recent/latest", that was supposed to mean "we're going to stop making new versions of Windows after 10, enjoy it while it lasts". I wonder what will happen after the Windows series eventually goes into the grave.

Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB seems to be the only one that will get support until 2030 (or even 2035, I don't know).

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6 minutes ago, Cacodemon345 said:

Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB seems to be the only one that will get support until 2030 (or even 2035, I don't know).

 

2035? I see extended support ending after January 2029 here.

 

And of course, as regular consumers we won't be using Enterprise.

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2 hours ago, seed said:

I do wonder what will happen after W10 eventually goes EOL in 2025, MS has stated a couple of times before that 10 is the last Windows. I still find it funny that some people didn't understand this statement. When MS said "last" they didn't mean "newest/most recent/latest", that was supposed to mean "we're going to stop making new versions of Windows after 10, enjoy it while it lasts". I wonder what will happen after the Windows series eventually goes into the grave.

I think you misunderstood. With Win10 Microsoft has already switched to a new support method. Instead of service packs there are semi-annual updates, each of which is supported for 18 months (some longer). But before those 18 months lapse, there will be 2-3 new versions released already, and users are expected to switch to get support.

 

Nothing special is happening in 2025. The original 10-year cycles are not relevant to Win10 individual users (although they remain relevant to enterprises on the LTSB branch). The original Win10 version released in 2015 has already gone end-of-life, but the later versions - currently, 1803, 1809 and 1903 are still supported. Microsoft's current plan is to continue with the policy of rolling updates and rolling support windows, indefinitely.

 

More info:

 

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/13853/windows-lifecycle-fact-sheet

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I am in favour of compulsory security updates on principle but am not so keen on forced feature updates.  A concern of mine was always that once automatic updates were compulsory Microsoft would use this as an opportunity in getting more aggressive with its default settings, which are claimed to be optimised for users but are often optimised for its revenue streams (I am well aware that Microsoft is far from the only company that does this, although it was one of the early pioneers).  On Win7 it was riskier to reset users' settings back to the defaults with each update because people might protest by turning Windows Update off and making their systems insecure.  With Win10 there are no such worries as they can't get out of having to update.

 

I have also found Microsoft to be over-aggressive in enforcing their mandatory Windows 10 updates policy, e.g. causing your computer to wake from sleep or hibernate in the middle of the night if it has found updates, which has resulted in me losing sleep and/or waking to an overly hot laptop on numerous occasions.  If you turn off the ability of Windows Update to wake the computer from sleep and hibernation, Microsoft will revert the setting back to the default with each update.  This is, I am guessing, to prevent users from avoiding updating by never restarting or shutting down their computers, but as Microsoft now allows a seven day "grace period" for most updates even on the Home edition, they could at least have applied a "grace period" for waking the computer from sleep or hibernation, rather than waking it immediately every time it finds an update.  Yes, for individual updates you can stop this by telling it to restart in up to 7 days' time, but this defaults to "off", and if you turn it "on", every time there's a new update, the setting goes back to the default.  There was also a recent occasion when I came back from holiday and Microsoft tried to force me to install a 6 hour feature update immediately upon my return, rather than allowing me to install it the following night.

 

It is true though that Microsoft is tending to dial back its heavy-handed enforcement of the policy with successive updates, as well as reducing the tendency to take advantage of forced updates as a way of nudging users towards default settings that are optimised to serve Microsoft's profit margins.  But I have a suspicion that this is only happening because enough people have been complaining about it and sticking with outdated and potentially insecure versions of Windows out of protest.  There are some positives to people sticking with Win7 for now, although I tend to agree that sticking with WinXP is too big a security risk, and that once Win7 stops being supported it will also head in that direction.

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2 hours ago, seed said:

And speaking of telemetry and data collection, I think some people have missed the fact that this has actually increased on older versions of Windows as well, some updates added more of it. I agree that modern software is a lot more intrusive when it comes to privacy these days, but if that is such a huge concern to anyone... you're peobably better off not touching modern software at all.

Sorry, missed this in my earlier response. People often confuse telemetry collection with spying. They are not the same. Telemetry is not there to collect personal data, but statistics on how people use the product, and which problems they encounter, to help the manufacturer fix the problems / improve the product. Telemetry is typically anonymous. It is not typically a privacy concern, although of course it is possible that it's implemented poorly and personal data leaks. The stated goals are different. Generally, telemetry is a good thing.

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55 minutes ago, dr_st said:

I think you misunderstood. With Win10 Microsoft has already switched to a new support method. Instead of service packs there are semi-annual updates, each of which is supported for 18 months (some longer). But before those 18 months lapse, there will be 2-3 new versions released already, and users are expected to switch to get support.

 

Nothing special is happening in 2025. The original 10-year cycles are not relevant to Win10 individual users (although they remain relevant to enterprises on the LTSB branch). The original Win10 version released in 2015 has already gone end-of-life, but the later versions - currently, 1803, 1809 and 1903 are still supported. Microsoft's current plan is to continue with the policy of rolling updates and rolling support windows, indefinitely.

 

I know how support goes for each version of 10, but is the latter really so? If that's true then the point still kinda stands anyway. I guess W10 is here to stay for a long time.

 

8 minutes ago, dr_st said:

Sorry, missed this in my earlier response. People often confuse telemetry collection with spying. They are not the same. Telemetry is not there to collect personal data, but statistics on how people use the product, and which problems they encounter, to help the manufacturer fix the problems / improve the product. Telemetry is typically anonymous. It is not typically a privacy concern, although of course it is possible that it's implemented poorly and personal data leaks. The stated goals are different. Generally, telemetry is a good thing.

 

Indeed, and yet that's what some have always bashed 10 for doing - not collecting anonymous statistics, but outright spying.

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Quote

The original RTM release of Windows 10 ("Windows 10, released in July 2015") receives mainstream support for five years after its original release, followed by five years of extended support, but this is subject to conditions. Microsoft's support lifecycle policy for the operating system notes that "Updates are cumulative, with each update built upon all of the updates that preceded it", that "a device needs to install the latest update to remain supported", and that a device's ability to receive future updates will depend on hardware compatibility, driver availability, and whether the device is within the OEM's "support period"‍—‌a new aspect not accounted for in lifecycle policies for previous versions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_10#Updates_and_support

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On 9/13/2019 at 7:02 AM, jeroa said:

 

how could i know if i already have malware?

 

It depends entirely on the malware you have. Popup ads on sites that should not have any. Poor performance. Money disappearing from your bank account. Accounts being hacked. Just make sure you are running decent anti-virus. Kaspersky tends to do the best in all the studies I have seen, with ESET a close second. ESET has free trials and I believe Kaspersky does too, and both go easy on your system resources where others like Norton, McAffee, Trend, AVG and Avast can be a bit resource hungry. Actually Windows Defender (built into Windows 8 and 10) got 100% on the last test I saw. Now tests should only ever be used as a rough guide - no one test can check everything - but that is still a remarkable accomplishment and a big turn around from the last test I saw.

 

On 9/13/2019 at 7:50 PM, Graf Zahl said:

It's the same old story that can be seen everywhere - people are entrenched into something and it's very hard to get out again.

 

100% correct. I see this constantly in my work as a technician. People hate change. Even something as prosaic as a Facebook layout change is usually followed by everyone getting out the virtual torches and pitchforks and demanding it be changed back. It's what I call tech blindness. If you watch an inexperienced user in an unfamiliar environment, it's like they view it under a microscope when in reality they should be stepping back, taking it all in, looking and comprehending. Usually the answer is right there in plain English but people just shut down, or worse straight up freak out. Really, in terms of core user functionality there is little difference between Windows 7 and 10. 8 was a disaster. I have been doing this stuff for nearly 30 years and even I got confused by Windows 8 sometimes.

 

It goes beyond tech. It is one of the great ironies of humanity - we by and large hate change and yet we live in a world and have created a society which in many ways does nothing but change. History is littered with the corpses of people and indeed entire civilisations who chose oblivion over change.

Edited by Murdoch

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4 hours ago, Murdoch said:

Actually Windows Defender (built into Windows 8 and 10) got 100% on the last test I saw. Now tests should only ever be used as a rough guide - no one test can check everything - but that is still a remarkable accomplishment and a big turn around from the last test I saw.

 

Only on W10 Windows Defender is an actual anti-virus packed with plenty of protection against various things, including ransomware, on 7 and 8 you still need a third party AV as it really isn't enough there, just bare-bones.

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With Win7, your Action Center should have advised you to get an anti-virus program. One of those offered was Microsoft's own Security Essentials.

 

At the time MS had that extra step because, well, people got annoyed for some reason when MS bundled vital software with the OS.

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6 hours ago, seed said:

 

Only on W10 Windows Defender is an actual anti-virus packed with plenty of protection against various things, including ransomware, on 7 and 8 you still need a third party AV as it really isn't enough there, just bare-bones.

 

Thanks. I was unaware those changes had not migrated back to 8. I see machines still running 7 in my shop more frequently than 8.

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7 hours ago, seed said:

 

Only on W10 Windows Defender is an actual anti-virus packed with plenty of protection against various things, including ransomware, on 7 and 8 you still need a third party AV as it really isn't enough there, just bare-bones.

 

I still don't trust it. It failed to catch the ransomware that spread from my job to my home machine, which the user had to have ran their payload on there (a pretty old payload too: GlobeImposter2.0).

 

But then again, Symantec Endpoint Protection didn't catch it either, a premium product at that...

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5 hours ago, R4L said:

 

I still don't trust it. It failed to catch the ransomware that spread from my job to my home machine, which the user had to have ran their payload on there (a pretty old payload too: GlobeImposter2.0).

 

But then again, Symantec Endpoint Protection didn't catch it either, a premium product at that...

Don't trust any sort of antivirus to catch malware at all times.

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12 minutes ago, Cacodemon345 said:

Don't trust any sort of antivirus to catch malware at all times.

 

I don't. A/V isn't sufficient anymore.

 

When I talked to engineers at Malwarebytes, they never spoke about A/V software, except that it's an outdated term. Malware is so sophisticated now that signature based scans just won't cut it. Real time scanning, machine learning (pretty much every security company has to offer something like this now) and traceability, now that's where it's at.

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My main issue with modern AV software is that it's simply too invasive and has to hook deeply into the operating system to work. And seeing how these companies operate, why should I trust them not to abuse the power their software gives to them? AV software can theoretically spy on EVERYTHING in the system, and in the end these companies want to sell a product. And they somehow need to finance their free versions so who's guaranteeing that they do not try to monetize the data they inevitably collect?

 

On top of that, any AV I tried either warned me of false positives and preemptively deleted valid data in the process, or is too bloated to run without a performance hit, or is just plain annoying to deal with, nag screens and other shit included. More recent versions of Avast were the worst of all - being guilty of all 3 issues I listed.

 

Ultimately there's a few things you can do to stay safe:

 

1. Use an email service/client that does a bit of thinking itself when dealing with attachments. A good one should never allow to open an attachment if its file name is suspicious or its contents cannot be verified. Any mail client that does allow starting executables right from the attachment should be outright banished and any manufacturer of such things be sued, if you ask me. The same goes to saving such executables to the hard drive to prevent them from getting started from there. This is such a common attack vector that any software manufacturer still allowing it to slip through should be boycotted.

2. Don't EVER run executables from suspicious origins, this particularly applies to anything from warez sites.

3. If you have to visit untrustworthy websites, make sure you got a strong filter activated, and only unlock it if absolutely necessary.

 

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