windows 7

What I did for Mother’s Day

Dave Farquhar Hardware, security, Windows , , , , , , , ,

Last month, Rapid7’s Trey Ford appealed to security professionals:

You have an opportunity to be an ambassador. When you see XP out there, have an adult conversation, educate in terms that others will appreciate. Your actions and words reflect on the entire community.

As the family CIO/CSO – look for the smart investment. There are options that will make your life easier. A small investment is a lot easier to stomach than compromised shopping/banking/credit card credentials (or identity theft.)

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Data compression, 1980s-style–and why PKZIP won

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing, security , , ,

My employer has me doing some very gray-hat work that I don’t want to describe in detail, because the information has a tremendous potential for misuse. But suffice it to say I’ve been trying to send data places the data shouldn’t go, and I tried to do it by going all 1987 on it by compressing the data with obsolete compression programs. Ever heard of security by obscurity? I was trying to bypass security by using obscurity. In the process, I learned why PKZIP won the compression wars.

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Microsoft was wrong whether it patched XP this time or let it burn

Dave Farquhar security, Windows , , , , ,

Years ago I heard a joke that reminds me of the situation Microsoft found itself in last week with its latest IE vulnerability:

If a man is alone in a forest, and there’s no woman there to hear him, is he still wrong?

I was as shocked as anyone when Microsoft released just one last Internet Explorer patch for Windows XP on May 1. I can argue either side of the issue, but I don’t think I can argue either side convincingly enough to get a simple 50.1% majority of people to agree with me, because I’m not sure I can argue either side of the issue convincingly enough that Iwould agree with myself.

I think it’s important that 26% of all web traffic is still coming from Windows XP today, nearly three weeks after it went end of life. That likely played into the decision. Microsoft was in a no-win situation here, and they had to decide whether they wanted to lose 1-0 or 24-1. So I don’t think it matters all that much, but here are the pros and cons of each side, as I see them. Read more

When Linux is easier than Windows

Dave Farquhar Software , , , , , ,

A few months ago I bought a Gigabyte GA-Z77M-D3H to learn computer forensics on, because at the time I thought that was the direction my career was going. I dropped it into a neglected Compaq case and installed Linux on it, since most of the free forensics tools run on Linux. The current version of Debian loaded effortlessly and ran nicely, as you would expect on a dual-core CPU with 16 gigs of RAM.

Then my career went another direction. Today I analyze Windows threats and vulnerabilities for a living. That’s a better match for my experience and the pay is the same, so I’m perfectly fine with that. But my mind turned to that hotrod computer in the basement. I suppose I could still use it to learn forensics, but I probably won’t, so why not see how Windows runs on it and bring it upstairs? Read more

So just how dangerous is an old, out of date operating system anyway?

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing , , , , , , ,

Glaurung brought up a good point in a comment yesterday. If you never go online and/or you’re really careful, do you really need to update your OS to something new?

In my professional opinion, it depends. Didn’t you know that would be my answer? Read more

Microsoft is offering some help in migrating off XP

Dave Farquhar security, Windows , , ,

Since there is no direct upgrade path from Windows XP to Windows 8.1 or even Windows 8, Microsoft has reacted to criticism by licensing a cut-down version of PC Mover and offering it to latter-day XP upgraders for free. It will only migrate three applications for you, but for most people, that’s probably enough.

The good news is that this version of PC Mover works with Windows 7 as well, so if you want to take the strategy of migrating people to $99 off-lease PCs running Windows 7, it will still help.

The linked article above criticized Microsoft for not developing its own migration tool, but that seems a bit harsh. I’ve used PC Mover before, and found it to be a very capable tool. I’d be surprised if Microsoft actually could do much better. And Microsoft has a history of licensing third-party tools anyway: Every disk defragmenter Microsoft has ever shipped was a cut-down version of something written by other companies.

Of course it’s best to rebuild machines from scratch–it will perform much faster that way–but when there’s a must-have program on an old PC and the installation media is long gone, PC Mover is about the only way to recover it and move it on. Most people probably don’t have much more than three programs in that category.

Free Windows 8.1 upgrades: Right idea, wrong target

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , ,

Last week, rumors started flying that Microsoft was going to make upgrades to a cut-down version of Windows 8.1 either free or very inexpensive for Windows 7 owners.

That’s not necessarily a bad idea, but the target is wrong. Here’s a great idea: Microsoft needs to be dangling the freebie in front of Windows XP owners. Read more

The world’s fastest budget PC

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

So, a relative’s PC was getting a bit aged, and runs Windows XP, barely, so I talked them into an upgrade. I noticed that Micro Center had HP/Compaq DC5700s for $99. They were standard issue office PCs a few years ago, and there are a lot of them in the refurb channel. We went and got one over the weekend.

“What are you going to do with that?” the sales rep asked. “We only use them as cash registers.”

“Word processing,” I said.

“You sure you want to run Windows 7 on an 8-year-old PC?”

“I wrote the book on running Windows on older PCs. Literally. It’ll be fine.”

I hate calling rank like that, but sometimes it’s what you have to do.

And really, for $99, it’s awfully good. Web browsing is plenty fast, Libre Office runs fine on it, and think about it. Windows 7 retails for $100-$109. So it’s like getting the hardware for free. Or Windows for free, however you want to look at it.

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My Windows 8.1 experience

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , ,

I installed Windows 8.1 last week to see how bad it really is.

And?

Well, it’s more stable than Windows Me, but Windows Me was a lot nicer to use. It’s awful. Because I listen to podcasts, I know that there’s magic in hovering your mouse over the upper right hand screen. And somehow I was able to get to a desktop pretty quickly. The first thing I did was launch Internet Explorer and install Classic Shell, which, as promised, makes it a dead ringer for Windows 7 or XP or even 2000 if you want. Much better.

What else? Read more

How to slipstream updates into Windows 8.1

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , ,

I need a Windows box, so I figured I’d experiment with Windows 8.1. I know it’s terrible, but I want to see just how much less terrible I can make it.

The first thing I wanted to do was figure out how to slipstream updates into it. I recommend slipstreaming because you get a faster performing system, you get the system up and running a lot sooner, and you save a lot of unnecessary writes to your SSD. It’s very similar to slipstreaming Windows 7, but not quite identical.

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