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invictius

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

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My guess is I'll just get Win10, slap classic shell on top of it, bitch about it for weeks like I bitched about Win7 back in the day, then get used to it.

Maybe I'll get a VM with Win7 for some of the stuff that doesn't run on 10, but honestly I expect that most of the stuff not running on 10 also didn't run on 7 already and I'm just gonna keep my WinXP VM for those occasions.

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1 hour ago, Graf Zahl said:

Yes, the entire internet. The main problem is not some stuff destroying the local machine but malware that acts as a botnet node or something even more sinister. And the damage that can be done this way goes far beyond that single upgrade resistant user.

But again, if your postulate is that running a supported OS is what makes one secure, then who will such a botnet threaten? Surely not the 'smart' users with updated system, but those 'idiots' who run unpatched/unsupported versions, right? So why do you care?

 

1 hour ago, Graf Zahl said:

Are you sure? Do you know every vulnerability of the system? The real danger comes from vulnerabilities that aren't known yet!

Please, Graf, this is just plain FUD. The same FUD that security freaks spread on every corner. Like "We don't know of a single example, and we can't think of one, and we've never seen one, but there must be something very sinister just around the corner, which just hasn't been discovered (but will be any second) and if you don't update, update, update now now now, it will surely destroy the world as we know it."

 

So why do you try to scare people with FUD? What will happen if some incredible vulnerability is discovered in XP that as soon as you enter a Google search, it automatically hacks all nuclear sites and launches missiles? Well, fuck. You know what will happen? Microsoft will patch it (if it is at all possible, and if the world hasn't been destroyed yet), because they would be forced to. Just like they did in the past (e.g., Wannacrypt); as soon as a threat was identified that was sufficiently severe - Microsoft went out and patched everything, even out-of-support systems. And if they didn't patch it, it means it wasn't all that bad.

 

And what will happen if such an incredible vulnerability is identified in Win10, and oh no, turns out that it can't be patched without changing the entire OS core. Well, we'll all be screwed then.

 

People tend to take these doom-and-gloom scenarios far too seriously. I've been hearing this FUD for over a decade, and how many such scenarios have come to pass that were (a) not caused by user action, (b) would have been prevented by running a fully updated system (i.e., a patch was available before the attack happened). Again, other than Wannacrypt I can't recall anything that had a serious impact.

 

2 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

Unlike XP which is quite lacking on its API side and may not support any software using more modern features, breaking Vista is a lot harder - I guess the main reason here is lack of machines to test on and generally irrelevant user share.

At first it was really just a case of not wanting to test. Some apps were simply blocking Vista for no relevant reason, and I was pretty annoyed at that point. With time the incompatibilities grew, as Microsoft itself blocked a lot of the modern API (Any VS from 2012 on, Office 2013 and later, .NET 4.7 and later) from running on Vista. Plus, their compilers started targeting Win7+ only by default. Once you depend on libraries that themselves don't support Vista, things start breaking (unless you take care to add a compatibility layer that will redirect to older APIs, ASOASF, and who wants to do that for that negligible user share?) So I can understand it and no longer blame the software vendors.

 

It's funny because in terms of security lifecycles, Vista and Win7 are essentially the same (as they draw on the Server 2008 SP2/R2 lifecycles which both terminate in January 2020), but in terms of mainstream support and API compatibility, Vista was thrown under the bus years ago.

 

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4 minutes ago, dr_st said:

But again, if your postulate is that running a supported OS is what makes one secure, then who will such a botnet threaten? Surely not the 'smart' users with updated system, but those 'idiots' who run unpatched/unsupported versions, right? So why do you care?

 

A botnet doesn't threaten the end user but the content providers. They were able to shut down a site like wikipedia for several hours, so yes, I absolutely DO care!

 

 

 

4 minutes ago, dr_st said:

Please, Graf, this is just plain FUD. The same FUD that security freaks spread on every corner. Like "We don't know of a single example, and we can't think of one, and we've never seen one, but there must be something very sinister just around the corner, which just hasn't been discovered (but will be any second) and if you don't update, update, update now now now, it will surely destroy the world as we know it."

 

No, this is not FUD! The biggest threat are zero day exploits and their very nature is that they are not known.

There were two serious threats since XP got unsupported and Microsoft pushed fixes for both. But who knows for how long they still do this?

 

 

4 minutes ago, dr_st said:

So why do you try to scare people with FUD? What will happen if some incredible vulnerability is discovered in XP that as soon as you enter a Google search, it automatically hacks all nuclear sites and launches missiles?

 

Do I need to mention Wikipedia again? DDoS attacks are not harmless, and hijacked computers are the main weapon to launch them.

 

 

4 minutes ago, dr_st said:

Well, fuck. You know what will happen? Microsoft will patch it (if it is at all possible, and if the world hasn't been destroyed yet), because they would be forced to. Just like they did in the past (e.g., Wannacrypt); as soon as a threat was identified that was sufficiently severe - Microsoft went out and patched everything, even out-of-support systems. And if they didn't patch it, it means it wasn't all that bad.

 

No, they won't fix XP until all eternity. They do not push fixes for Windows 9x anymore so if those old unpatched systems were used for attacks, you'd be completely defenseless.

 

 

4 minutes ago, dr_st said:

And what will happen if such an incredible vulnerability is identified in Win10, and oh no, turns out that it can't be patched without changing the entire OS core. Well, we'll all be screwed then.

 

Yes, we would. Let's hope it never happens.

 

 

4 minutes ago, dr_st said:

People tend to take these doom-and-gloom scenarios far too seriously. I've been hearing this FUD for over a decade, and how many such scenarios have come to pass that were (a) not caused by user action, (b) would have been prevented by running a fully updated system (i.e., a patch was available before the attack happened). Again, other than Wannacrypt I can't recall anything that had a serious impact.

 

No, people like you do not take them seriously enough. What if someone with truly evil intentions launched an all-out DDoS attack against some larger infrastructure? The damage would be huge. In fact I am dead certain that such attacks are frequently run, but that many critical systems habe been hardened enough to deflect them. But once an attack is successful it will be very obvious.

 

4 minutes ago, dr_st said:

It's funny because in terms of security lifecycles, Vista and Win7 are essentially the same (as they draw on the Server 2008 SP2/R2 lifecycles which both terminate in January 2020), but in terms of mainstream support and API compatibility, Vista was thrown under the bus years ago.

 

It wasn't thrown under the bus, its use just declined enough to become irrelevant.

 

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6 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

A botnet doesn't threaten the end user but the content providers. They were able to shut down a site like wikipedia for several hours, so yes, I absolutely DO care!

OK, I understand now what you are talking about. A distributed network of bots, consisting mostly of hijacked computers around the globe, which executes a DDoS attack that is completely unstoppable by any firewall.

 

I agree that such attacks is definitely something to consider, have happened before and will keep on happening once in a while. I would appreciate if you have any supporting evidence to show that hijacked systems running unsupported versions of Windows (versus, say, modern versions not updated to the latest security patch level) have played critical roles in such attacks.

 

6 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

No, this is not FUD! The biggest threat are zero day exploits and their very nature is that they are not known.

There were two serious threats since XP got unsupported and Microsoft pushed fixes for both. But who knows for how long they still do this?

This is by very definition FUD - Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt. Who knows what might happen? We don't know anything about the threat, so it might be huge. Things were one way before, but they might change in the future in unpredictable ways. No, we don't have any evidence or examples, but it sounds logical. Yes, this is spreading FUD.

 

Note, I'm not saying that FUD is always wrong, or that spreading it is always bad. Just that one should differentiate it from concrete, known issues.

 

6 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

No, they won't fix XP until all eternity. They do not push fixes for Windows 9x anymore so if those old unpatched systems were used for attacks, you'd be completely defenseless.

Well, yeah. But the fact that these unpatched systems have been around for almost two decades and the world hasn't come to a fiery end suggests that maybe the magnitude of the threat is exaggerated.

 

6 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

What if someone with truly evil intentions launched an all-out DDoS attack against some larger infrastructure? The damage would be huge. In fact I am dead certain that such attacks are frequently run, but that many critical systems habe been hardened enough to deflect them.

Precisely. The cyber-war never stops, and things happen all the time. Where you and I differ is on the importance we assign to the role that Windows XP systems that connect to the internet every once in a while from behind standard home routers play in this cyber-war.

Edited by dr_st

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our leaser gave us an ultimatum so i switched to puppy linux after testing it for a month or so. not a good experience so far, but i did not have a good experience with windoes eithre

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50 minutes ago, dr_st said:

This is by very definition FUD - Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt. Who knows what might happen? We don't know anything about the threat, so it might be huge. Things were one way before, but they might change in the future in unpredictable ways. No, we don't have any evidence or examples, but it sounds logical. Yes, this is spreading FUD.

 

Throwing caution in the wind and writing off any warning as FUD is just foolhardy. We all have seen what can happen if computers get hijacked. And it has also been proven countless times that an old, unpatched system is far more vulnerable than a modern patched one. Yes, the numbers of these systems is relatively small, but the ease of getting in is also magnitudes smaller.

 

50 minutes ago, dr_st said:

Well, yeah. But the fact that these unpatched systems have been around for almost two decades and the world hasn't come to a fiery end suggests that maybe the magnitude of the threat is exaggerated.

 

What you completely forget here is that Windows XP is the predecessor of all modern Windows versions, so any patch for Windows 10 may reveal a vulnerability in XP. And trust me - the hackers carefully watch what gets patched and will try every single one of these out to see which attacks may succeed and which won't. Windows 9x is an entirely different code base so not much of what affects Windows 10 is relevant for them.


 

50 minutes ago, dr_st said:

Precisely. The cyber-war never stops, and things happen all the time. Where you and I differ is on the importance we assign to the role that Windows XP systems that connect to the internet every once in a while from behind standard home routers play in this cyber-war.

 

Yes. In my opinion, unpatched XP systems, shitty IoT hardware and other easy to crack systems will play a big role here. There's still too many XP systems in Third World countries to discount them as irrelevant.

 

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I would not call either Mac OS or Windows rock solid with updates. Fixing Windows update issues with customer's computers is not exactly my bread and butter but it is a semi-frequent occurrence. Have encountered some Mac OS update bugs too but considering Macs are less than 1% of my business, that's not really much to go on.

 

Windows 10 in general is definitely not without issues. However I do not think MS gets credit for what they accomplished - a free in place OS upgrade for millions of computers, each with unique hardware and software combinations. And in terms of the upgrade itself, they got far more right than wrong. That's pretty impressive.

Edited by Murdoch

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I will keep using Windows 7 for many years to come. I haven't applied a single Windows update patch since 2016, don't run antivirus, and the world hasn't fallen apart. No strange credit card charges, no missing bank account funds, no breached logins, and the CPU idles a cool and constant 0-1%.

 

Software compatibility issues remain nonexistent, and I'm never interrupted in the middle of what I'm doing for a mandatory reboot to install some government spyware upgrade.

 

Haven't heard a single decent argument why I should change what I'm doing.

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1 hour ago, insertwackynamehere said:

A thread about dragging feet on upgrading from a 10 year old+ release of Windows turns into unprovoked bashing of Apple users as fanboys. Ironic

 

I never said all Apple users are fanboys. Not once. But some of them are. Rabid, annoying, and unable to accept fair and objective critiques of their platform. Fanboyism infects pretty much every tech platform on the planet. It is by no means unique to Apple.

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4 hours ago, jeroa said:

our leaser gave us an ultimatum so i switched to puppy linux after testing it for a month or so. not a good experience so far, but i did not have a good experience with windoes eithre

Puppy Linux is very barebones.

 

What kind of hardware are you running? If your hardware supports it, something like Linux Mint or MX Linux would be far easier for a Windows user. They're more user friendly, there is more software available for them, and they are much more feature complete.

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FUD or not, this is why I tend to keep my old retro computers off of the Internet outright. There's a lot of value to having them run old OSes - software compatibility, the ability to use older obsoleted hardware or standards like Voodoo cards or A3D - but none of that necessitates connecting up to the 'net, when a sneakernet file transfer is sufficient.

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Just now, famicommander said:

Puppy Linux is very barebones.

 

What kind of hardware are you running? If your hardware supports it, something like Linux Mint or MX Linux would be far easier for a Windows user. They're more user friendly, there is more software available for them, and they are much more feature complete.

 

i have an old laptop with 2.50 ghz processor and 4 gig ram and an old desktop with a 3 ghz processor and 1 gig ram. do you think they could run Mint? Windwos often ran slow on me

 

as an aside is linus really more secure?

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3 minutes ago, jeroa said:

 

i have an old laptop with 2.50 ghz processor and 4 gig ram and an old desktop with a 3 ghz processor and 1 gig ram. do you think they could run Mint? Windwos often ran slow on me

 

as an aside is linus really more secure?

The machine with 4 GB of RAM should do fine with Linux Mint. MX Linux is better for lower resource machines. 

 

1 GB is pretty low but you might get away with it on something like Antix Linux. If you could somehow stretch it to 2 GB RAM, that would be a lot more realistic for an MX Linux install.

 

And yes, Linux is more secure than Windows. Partly because of its Unix-like design and root user system, partly because its lesser desktop popularity makes it a less popular target for malware. There is no need for any additional security programs on a modern Linux distribution as long as you keep it up to date.

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thanks for all the info famicom. i think i can get more memory for the desktop, whar is a recommended amount for dooming?

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aside from gaming, in what other ways is it a downgrade? im no fan of linux im just curious since i have to use it

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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.

 

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33 minutes 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.

 

It really depends on the tools you need. A lot of Open Source software is perfectly adequate (Gimp or Inkscape for instance), yet others (*cough* Libreoffice *cough*) are total garbage and run like crap. For software development however I'd take Linux any day of the week.

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3 hours ago, jeroa said:

thanks for all the info famicom. i think i can get more memory for the desktop, whar is a recommended amount for dooming?

 

More is always better. But Doom should run on modest hardware; it's modern web browsers that are going to eat u.p the most resources. But 4 GB of RAM should be comfortable

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1 hour ago, Doom64hunter said:

It really depends on the tools you need. A lot of Open Source software is perfectly adequate (Gimp or Inkscape for instance), yet others (*cough* Libreoffice *cough*) are total garbage and run like crap.

 

Yes, precisely that.

 

 

1 hour ago, Doom64hunter said:

For software development however I'd take Linux any day of the week.

 

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.

 

1 hour ago, famicommander said:

But 4 GB of RAM should be comfortable

 

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

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26 minutes ago, Graf Zahl said:

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

 

For basic users (ie: 99% of my customer base) 4 is fine. But for gamers and anyone who considers themselves tech savvy yes 8gb is a definite minimum.

 

I have not done much with Linux. I did a test with Linux mint recently and was very impressed by the boot speed even off a USB 2 flash drive. I am going to build a tv set top box with an old laptop driving it. Since most media activity I want is browser based mint is definitely a candidate but there's other media pc builds to experiment with.

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I'm assuming that @jeroa is likely running DDR2 considering he stated that he has 1GB of RAM and an old 3.0 GHz processor. Since he might be running something really old i'd say that the more RAM that you can stuff in that older machine, the better imo, especially if you plan on using it for more modern purposes.

 

I am not a tech btw. This is just my opinion. I do agree with @Murdoch that for basic stuff (if it's newer DDR4 RAM) that 4GB should be sufficient and for gaming that 8GB's should be minimum. I'm still running 16GB's of 4x4GB sticks at DDR3-1600 Mhz.

Edited by CyberDreams

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2 hours ago, CyberDreams said:

I'm assuming that @jeroa is likely running DDR2 considering he stated that he has 1GB of RAM and an old 3.0 GHz processor. Since he might be running something really old i'd say that the more RAM that you can stuff in that older machine, the better imo, especially if you plan on using it for more modern purposes.

 

A lot of older boards had comparatively small limits and come to think of it I do not think I ever saw a DIMM size bigger than 4GB in DDR2. A quick Google search appears to confirm this. If he's running 32bit compiled apps or OS they can only use 3.5GB max.

 

All told, 8GB will be about the most that can be practically used in his situation I think. Anything that could potentially make use of more than that amount of RAM will probably still run like ass on a CPU that old. As I often say to my customers, RAM is not instant "go faster juice".

 

If he's after more RAM, pillaging old computers in Good Will and similar places might prove cost effective. RAM faults are relatively rare in DDR3 and DDR4, a little more common with DDR2 but still not all that frequent.

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Win7 is not really my main OS, I keep it besides my linux-of-the-moment (elementary OS currently) to run a few windows-only games.

 

I guess I'll install the final free updates of 2019, then I'll keep the system untouched for years to come. I may switch to ReactOS when it goes beyond beta stage.

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3 hours ago, Murdoch said:

 

For basic users (ie: 99% of my customer base) 4 is fine.

 

Even for those users, 4MB is pushing it. Seeing how the memory usage of web browsers increases exponentially, especially with web sites aimed at average people and no filters installed, the browser can easily hog a few GB and grind the system to a halt.

To be clear: Gaming et. al. hardly makes my computer break a sweat, it's merely the browser that's causing problems, and nothing else.

 

 

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