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

21 minutes ago, Graf Zahl said:

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.

Yea... I feel this frustration. I recently had to do some changes around and I'm still struggling to find one that does the job just fine, Kaspersky was the closest thing I came across. Then they retired their original free version...

It's unnecessarily difficult to find a good one if you ask me, some are bare-bones, others are a resource hog, others too intrusive, and some are of all these and more. Based on my experience over the years, the worst are: AVG, Avast, and the recent Bitdefender. Shame, Bitdefender actually used to be good... The first 2 can also be easily accused of spying as they deliberately leave executables behind after uninstall with tasks in Task Scheduler that you have to manually remove. This is beyond pathetic. And Bitdefender also leaves various folders behind, especially in Start Menu, that you have to manually delete. "Uninstall", sure.

Norton is something I've not touched in a long time, but last time I did, the protection it offered was simply put, abysmal. Finding an actually good software nowadays is no easy job.

I have long moved from third-party antivirus software to the one from Microsoft in Windows 10. Frankly I don't need them hogging my computer needlessly and eating my performance.

Better stay cautious of what kind of websites I visit, what kind of stuff I download and when I receive e-mails.

Nobody really knows how to judge anti-virus programs and their effectiveness. It's not really possible, and none of them are going to cover everything.

Combined with all the concerns Graf stated about them gaining the ability to watch everything you do (usually through kernel drivers or SYSTEM-level processes), it probably is best off just to stick with Microsoft's own. If you have concerns about Microsoft spying on you, think twice about running Microsoft Windows. :P

4 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

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.

Clearly it should be stated that it's not limited to executables. Specially crafted data files (e.g. JPEG, PDF) are also a software vulnerability vector.

Lately I just rely on these safety mechanisms:

1. Google Search seems good enough at blacklisting dangerous or compromised sites "which might harm my computer". So there's that.
2. Browsers are also good enough at preventing me from visiting hijacked security HTTPS sites.
3. I don't visit warez sites, I have a job now and can afford to pay, or am fine with the inferior open-source software for hobby stuff.
4. I always check suspicious emails by looking at sender's address. So far all fishy emails have had wrong email address domains. I haven't encountered spoofing yet.
5. Most of my browsing has shrunk to a few social media macro-sites (like Facebook), some well-known news sites (not tabloids), some well-known blogs and some developer/hobby stuff. It's no longer the wide web surfing of many years ago. Scam links are easy to spot.

25 minutes ago, printz said:

Specially crafted data files (e.g. JPEG, PDF) are also a software vulnerability vector.

  

While that can happen, there's simply no way to craft such a file that makes all supporting software go haywire, attacks are often targeted as the standard viewers for them. It's also a good idea to use non-standard viewers for such things - especially PDFs.

All this talk of following safe practices reminds me of my parents for some reason. They have zero clue how to recognize a fishy e-mail, link, or website, and have the tendency of being way too curious for their own good ("Hey, this random person sent me an e-mail asking for help, I should check it out". "Oh, a fake e-mail claiming my info was lost, I should totally re-enter my info and send it to a highly questionable address". "Look, look! This ad claims I have won a phone, I should claim my prize!"). The latter was from many years ago when I didn't use ad blockers, but you get the point.

I am honestly terrified at the idea that they can use the PC when I'm not around, 'cause I never know what dumb thing they'll do. And I have witnessed how it is like to lose all your stuff by doing something stupid, that's just nightmare fuel.

I guess I should consider myself lucky that my mother is the biggest technophobe imaginable. No chance she'd ever touch a computer or a smartphone... :)

I forcibly migrated my relatives to Linux.

I told them I will help with any hardware problems, I will help with any software issues on Linux or Mac, but I am officially done fixing broken Windows installations and/or trying to remove malware simply because they refuse to install updates, run Adblock, use antivirus, and exercise common sense.

If they want to keep using Windows that's fine with me, but it means they need to learn to deal with their own problems.

With all of them on Linux now I only hear from them when whatever distribution I put them on needs to be updated to a newer version, which is easy.

That's all nice and easy, when you're not sharing the same roof... it would have also been perfect if we had more than one machine in our house, but we all have to share the same one...

If I was still a kid this wouldn't have been such an issue, for a number of reasons, but I'm no longer in a position where I can afford to just format the PC every time they break it. Now thankfully, I've been lucky enough to not have them doing something stupid on the new machine, but they sure did some nasty shit on the old one where the aforementioned examples occurred. Worst is, that they don't even know what they're doing, every time I noticed something changed and I asked them about what they did... "I didn't do anything". Sigh...

It's the same with phones, none of them know how to keep them in optimal condition, they just mess with apps and install a bunch of them, keep a ton of services running and lots of files to fill the memory, and then wonder "Why is this phone barely working anymore??" But at least each one has their own phone, so they brick it, they fix it.

I'm being considerate and I understand that they have serious troubles with this technology, and I'm no tech guru either, but sometimes it's just too much hassle. I would simply stop using something that brings me only frustration and makes me depend on someone else to fix my problems.

14 hours ago, seed said:

All this talk of following safe practices reminds me of my parents for some reason. They have zero clue how to recognize a fishy e-mail, link, or website, and have the tendency of being way too curious for their own good ("Hey, this random person sent me an e-mail asking for help, I should check it out". "Oh, a fake e-mail claiming my info was lost, I should totally re-enter my info and send it to a highly questionable address". "Look, look! This ad claims I have won a phone, I should claim my prize!"). The latter was from many years ago when I didn't use ad blockers, but you get the point.

That's brutal. Hopefully neither of your parents passed any of their genes on to you.

13 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

I guess I should consider myself lucky that my mother is the biggest technophobe imaginable. No chance she'd ever touch a computer or a smartphone... :)

Same here :)

I should actually consider myself lucky that my parents just use their smartphones just for news-checking XD.

On another note, the latest Windows 10 1903 Patch Tuesday knocks out WiFi on some computers. There are also some more issues in the updates. Makes me wonder if I should just turn my Windows Update off using some means and upgrade via an offline ISO instead every time a feature update is released.

1 hour ago, Cacodemon345 said:

I should actually consider myself lucky that my parents just use their smartphones just for news-checking XD.

 

On another note, the latest Windows 10 1903 Patch Tuesday knocks out WiFi on some computers. There are also some more issues in the updates. Makes me wonder if I should just turn my Windows Update off using some means and upgrade via an offline ISO instead every time a feature update is released.

Would advise against using various tools to modify those things, they usually create more problems than solve.

But yeah, the latest cumulative update is one of the "best" MS has graced computers with in a while. Borked non-Stereo sound, WiFi, DPC latency spikes on certain hardware combinations, and a recent Defender update broke the scans (already fixed though). It must be fun to be MS these days :p. But in all seriousness, 1903 has definitely been the buggiest feature update since 1607, way too many bugs slipped through and MS introduces bugs in each cumulative update.

Then again, 1809, while being solid now, was also a disaster at launch with bugs that caused the deletion of user files (by far its most infamous issue). I also experienced the stupid broken Action Center bug when it came out, and they fixed that almost 2 months later. The problem here, is that MS no longer has a real QA/QC department, they dissolved it and fired those employees and replaced it with Insiders and test rings, which obviously is simply not enough anymore.