DosFreak wrote:

If you want extended support for Windows 7 then you'll have to be a business and you'll have to pay MS big money until 2023 when they end support. It sounds good in theory for businesses but in practice it's not since the updates do not get very good QA and seeing how Windows 10 has had issues with updates and that's their current OS they are supporting then you can see the issue there.

I asked about it for a business, but it is for volume licence customers only. First year is not expensive, if this listing is true: https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-much-will-s … the-price-list/

Can one use a win7pro key to activate 10pro after a fresh install?

keropi wrote:

Can one use a win7pro key to activate 10pro after a fresh install?

Yes. Although that may not work forever.

Microsoft hasn’t released any sort of statement about this upgrade method at all. It’s possible that Microsoft will disable it soon, but it’s also possible Microsoft will look the other way and keep this trick around to encourage more Windows 10 upgrades for a long time to come.

keropi wrote:

Can one use a win7pro key to activate 10pro after a fresh install?

I believe you can. I used mine for a fresh VM install

schmatzler wrote:

Windows 10 Pro is pretty decent. There are a few questionable decisions (like app suggestions for Candy Crush etc.) but they're […]
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Windows 10 Pro is pretty decent. There are a few questionable decisions (like app suggestions for Candy Crush etc.) but they're mostly optical annoyances or tiny background problems that can be fixed quickly.

What I always do when I install Windows 10 is use Winaero Tweaker afterwards and tick all the obvious boxes: Disable uploading updates to others (because I want my bandwidth for myself), Disable Telemetry, Disable Cortana, Disable Start Menu Suggestions.

I also install the subsystem for Linux and Winaero Tweaker can then put a right-click link to bash into the menus.
With that, I can use my Linux tools of choice (like grep, find and ssh) while still having access to Photoshop and Illustrator.

I would love to switch to Linux completely, but that's impossible in an advertising agency. I have access to it on our beefy corporate server, so that's fine for me - I'm not forgetting the skills from the Linux world. 😀

Regarding Windows 7: I don't use it on at all on my systems anymore. There's just no need for it. Everything that runs on 7 will also run on 10. I have a few XP and 98SE machines because some software depends on these specific versions. That's not the case for 7.

Maybe there will be a tweak like the PosReady hack for XP that gave us updates up until the start of this year if the demand is there.

Where can I get Winaero tweaker?

DosFreak wrote:

If you are allowing ads and/or javascript, java, flash etc and you are not keeping your perimeter firewall up to date and your software firewall up to date then you are vulnerable no matter how l33t you are.

You're not supposed to allow ads, that's for sure (you may want to whitelist some specific sites in your adblocker, but that's by choice). As for scripting and flash - it's a tougher call, because a lot of sites rely on that for their normal functionality. A whitelist of trusted sites is also possible here, but harder to manage.

DosFreak wrote:

Also you may think you are unimportant and to a botnet you are but the botnet doesn't care and you'll be infected as part of the swarm and your info silently collected or sold for a potential ransomware victim.

That's definitely true. Ransomware will happily hit anyone it can, hoping that a large enough percentage of people will pay to release their files. Typically it doesn't collect the files, though, just encrypts them in place. Still, once infected, you can never be sure what leaked and where. Better to avoid that. 😀

bfcastello wrote:

Except that it's kinda difficult to keep your browsers up to date when you are using retro OSes.

That's definitely true, but in the case of Win7 it will hopefully be possible for longer, because of the OS's popularity and the fact that it supports pretty much every Win32 API that Win10 does. So as long as the browser is a Win32 app and not a Modern app, it shouldn't be to difficult to extend support to Win7, unless the browser vendor just decides to blacklist it.

bfcastello wrote:

Like it was mentioned to me before and somewhere in this forum, the most "updated" option for Win 9x would be roytam1's retrozilla browser and I believe it is nowhere near 99% safe yet. Or is it?

Well, Win9x in itself is 99% safe, because it shares very little code with modern NT-based Windows, and so a lot of the exploits simply won't apply. Plus it is not targeted due to the negligible user base. It gets safer every day without you having to do anything. XP is another matter.

schmatzler wrote:

Regarding Windows 7: I don't use it on at all on my systems anymore. There's just no need for it. Everything that runs on 7 will also run on 10. I have a few XP and 98SE machines because some software depends on these specific versions. That's not the case for 7.

That's true about software, but not about hardware. Older hardware may not have proper support in Win10 or have only limited functionality. Hardware works best with contemporary OSes where the driver support is optimal.

SirNickity wrote:

I did something similar back when Win 2K was current. Built a test box with Win 2000 Pro, left it online overnight, was infected with Code Red the next morning.

Lesson: Don't do that. Firewalls exist.

Firewalls exist, NAT routers exist (virtually no one connects directly to the cable/DSL line), security updates exist. Every version of Windows going out of support has been receiving security updates for more than 10 years, by definition.

bfcastello wrote:

Where can I get Winaero tweaker?

A simple web search brings it up. It seems a very convenient tool that has many useful settings in the same place, although as far as I can see, everything it does can be configured separately through the OS UI.

SirNickity wrote:

I looked at the skeleton layout of a few web pages with developer tools enabled and it made me light-headed. DIVs within DIVs for days.

Don’t bother looking at the code of a Moodle school portal then. You’re head will literally explode - that’s what I have to deal with at work. I am very tired of this. I wish the code were more clean.

If you have some time to watch, this ex M$ employee explains a bit of why Windows 10 updates are such a disaster.

https://youtu.be/S9kn8_oztsA

Has anyone here tried deepin? Looks like a nice Linux distro and seems to get a bit of praise.

https://www.deepin.org/en/

TLDR; from a:
privacy standpoint Windows10 is a nightmare, but there is paid support for Windows 7 and those updates will leak.
security standpoint there are zero days on every platform and that will not change, however I would be more
concerned of malware.

So, I would keep everything the same and get and old laptop, install debian or ubuntu for banking and such.
Its a cheap solution and you can keep on gaming 😁

cyclone3d wrote:

I did a fun little experiment a couple years ago. […]
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SirNickity wrote:

TBH, I don't really have that much fear about EOS being the death knell for secure computing. For one, there's no such thing as secure computing. For two, I still have XP and Win 7 machines that I haven't bothered to enable WU on. They're fine. They can reach out to the dirty old Internet any time they like, and have yet to contract a social disease from doing so.

I did a fun little experiment a couple years ago.

I installed XP on a machine and didn't update it or install any security software on it.

Hooked it up to my cable modem and let it sit there doing nothing.

Within about 15 minutes the system was hosed with viruses/malware.

Any OS connected directly to the cable modem with software firewall disabled will suffer similarly. Just putting it behind a NAT router will eliminate almost all threats (if it's just sitting there doing nothing). Similarly, just turning the firewall on and connecting straight to the cable modem will eliminate almost all threats. But who in real life actually does that? Any normal use case will be behind a router and every OS from XP SP2 forward has the software firewall turned on out of the box.

clueless1 wrote:

cyclone3d wrote:

I did a fun little experiment a couple years ago. […]
Show full quote

SirNickity wrote:

TBH, I don't really have that much fear about EOS being the death knell for secure computing. For one, there's no such thing as secure computing. For two, I still have XP and Win 7 machines that I haven't bothered to enable WU on. They're fine. They can reach out to the dirty old Internet any time they like, and have yet to contract a social disease from doing so.

I did a fun little experiment a couple years ago.

I installed XP on a machine and didn't update it or install any security software on it.

Hooked it up to my cable modem and let it sit there doing nothing.

Within about 15 minutes the system was hosed with viruses/malware.

Any OS connected directly to the cable modem with software firewall disabled will suffer similarly. Just putting it behind a NAT router will eliminate almost all threats (if it's just sitting there doing nothing). Similarly, just turning the firewall on and connecting straight to the cable modem will eliminate almost all threats. But who in real life actually does that? Any normal use case will be behind a router and every OS from XP SP2 forward has the software firewall turned on out of the box.

Anybody who had any sense, including us Win98 user at the time had a software firewall of some type set up. Iirc I used Kerio. It was small and did a great job informing the user what was going on wrt incoming and outgoing packets and would warn you of anything out of the ordinary.

I think it's time we should write a topic to tell people about the security for web browsing with retroOSes, huh? I mean, leave some instructions there, like the topic that was created years ago for installing Windows on DOSBox. I think it was Dominus or DOSFreak who created it?

Just an idea.

clueless1 wrote:

cyclone3d wrote:

I did a fun little experiment a couple years ago. […]
Show full quote

SirNickity wrote:

TBH, I don't really have that much fear about EOS being the death knell for secure computing. For one, there's no such thing as secure computing. For two, I still have XP and Win 7 machines that I haven't bothered to enable WU on. They're fine. They can reach out to the dirty old Internet any time they like, and have yet to contract a social disease from doing so.

I did a fun little experiment a couple years ago.

I installed XP on a machine and didn't update it or install any security software on it.

Hooked it up to my cable modem and let it sit there doing nothing.

Within about 15 minutes the system was hosed with viruses/malware.

Any OS connected directly to the cable modem with software firewall disabled will suffer similarly. Just putting it behind a NAT router will eliminate almost all threats (if it's just sitting there doing nothing). Similarly, just turning the firewall on and connecting straight to the cable modem will eliminate almost all threats. But who in real life actually does that? Any normal use case will be behind a router and every OS from XP SP2 forward has the software firewall turned on out of the box.

Remember the days you used dial up networking on Windows 95 to connect to the internet? 😵

well i will keep using windows 7 as i don't care and don't use it for serious things (banking, shopping or other similar usage scenarios), in the present i still use XP with firefox and chrome for reading forums and such
also, I never update (after installing windows without internet connection, i disable everything related to windows update) use the os'es as is only with service packs and other major updates

appiah4 wrote:

Remember the days you used dial up networking on Windows 95 to connect to the internet? 😵

I sure do! It took a little while after the adoption of broadband before I was willing to give up the ability to remote in to my home PC and run an app that gave me some other kind of access (like FTP) without having to forward it in a router. Some of the nasties, and the end of my ISP's "just connect up to 10 devices and pull public IPs via DHCP" policy were convincing evidence that times were a'changing.

Then again, even in the 95 days, my friends and I would toy with visitors in our IRC channel by hitting them with WinNuke or Back Orifice. Looking back, it seemed like good clean harmless fun at the time, but I don't quite hold that same opinion anymore.

SirNickity wrote:

appiah4 wrote:

Remember the days you used dial up networking on Windows 95 to connect to the internet? 😵

I sure do! It took a little while after the adoption of broadband before I was willing to give up the ability to remote in to my home PC and run an app that gave me some other kind of access (like FTP) without having to forward it in a router. Some of the nasties, and the end of my ISP's "just connect up to 10 devices and pull public IPs via DHCP" policy were convincing evidence that times were a'changing.

Then again, even in the 95 days, my friends and I would toy with visitors in our IRC channel by hitting them with WinNuke or Back Orifice. Looking back, it seemed like good clean harmless fun at the time, but I don't quite hold that same opinion anymore.

Agreed. In my time I used to connect at night - particularly after midnight, as the dial up was much more cheaper in Brazil past midnight (don't ask me why).

I also did that (WinNuke and Back Orifice) fun when I was doing $#*t in IRC channels. I still hold the same opinion as you there. Now I connect through a router at home with some more devices as well, but I cannot remote to my home PC from my office (or vice versa) anymore either. I wish I could. Broadband ruined my fun times.

.

appiah4 wrote:

Remember the days you used dial up networking on Windows 95 to connect to the internet? 😵

We did it on Win98Fe sharing the interweb via ppp over 10Base2 from one end of the house to another. First time I installed Ubuntu it didn't have ppp support and expected every one to be on *DSL. Bit of a pain really.

bfcastello wrote:

. I still hold the same opinion as you there. Now I connect through a router at home with some more devices as well, but I cannot remote to my home PC from my office (or vice versa) anymore either. I wish I could. Broadband ruined my fun times.

I would have thought that would be a relatively simiple if you had the rights/permissions to do so.

Caluser2000 wrote:

bfcastello wrote:

. I still hold the same opinion as you there. Now I connect through a router at home with some more devices as well, but I cannot remote to my home PC from my office (or vice versa) anymore either. I wish I could. Broadband ruined my fun times.

I would have thought that would be a relatively simiple if you had the rights/permissions to do so.

Yeah, but for some reason my internet provider does not let me try it.

Caluser2000 wrote:

Anybody who had any sense, including us Win98 user at the time had a software firewall of some type set up. Iirc I used Kerio. It was small and did a great job informing the user what was going on wrt incoming and outgoing packets and would warn you of anything out of the ordinary.

I used to use Zone Alarm. I think it was the first software firewall that offered outbound filtering, and let us users finally see which apps were phoning home behind our backs. It was awesome in the beginning, then it started getting more commercialized went downhill fast.