Legacy Update: Fix Windows Update on Windows XP, Vista, Server 2008, 2003, 2000
legacyupdate.net
legacyupdate.net
No. 7 was a rollback on Vista. The best one which was not a step back but rather a step forward was Windows 2000. (Some even swear by NT4, which I feel also has some merit.)
I'm on the fence, but frequently say that 2000 was probably the best. Then I have to qualify that maybe the preview 64-bit XP or full win2003 might be first or in the running because 64-bit is such a major/critical feature to modern computer that if you wanted to sell a modern "Windows for business" release you would have to pick one of the 64-bit versions rather than rolling back to 2k.
I too ran 2k3 (64-bit of course on my athlon64) for a while as a desktop and technically it was fantastic, but eventually ended up switching back to XP with a few hacks to just avoid the general issue that a number of pieces of desktop software refused to run on a "server OS" without buying the server license for $$$$.
There was also some tiny difference between the active window colors as well, IIRC.
But you can choose "Windows Classic" as a style in Windows 7 and it will not to be too different, although some thing may be annoying.
For example, Windows 2000 was more keyboard-friendly. In Explorer, you edit the path on the top input, then you tab and you move between files. Since Windows XP that has been increasing, and its 5 tabs in Windows 7. Pratically unusable
The control panel is not yet fucked up like in Windows 8+ but still you can guess the year in which the entry was written.
On the other side, the start menu is better because you have a search field that works well (no web stupid web searches there).
But Windows 2000 was solid as well
My completely unqualified ranking…
- 2k: excellent, top Windows
- XP: fine, if you turn off all the UI changes, but not appealing over 2k in any way I can recall
- Vista: didn’t use it, but I think it got a bad rep for efforts that should’ve been lauded
- 7: good enough, mostly didn’t suck for web compatibility testing
- 8: I’m one of the weirdos who found it very compelling… but not enough to actually use it. I’m sure it was as bad in practice as everyone who used it thinks, but I really appreciated the bold attempt at a UI for any device. And I’d been very taken by earlier Metro.
- 10: seemed like a perfectly reasonable reversion to evolving 7, but also seemed like it got weirder and worse as they dug into no new versions.
- 11: new version doesn’t seem to have improved things on that front.
- 3.x-98: I didn’t like them, but objectively they were probably just as good as their contemporary Mac offerings just catering to different markets
- ME: lol why even did this exist
To get Internet Explorer 5.5 deployed as widely as possible which was their strategy pre-DOJ: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application
Maybe I’m just softening because I haven’t had to deal with IE for so long, but I really do think it’s an incredible achievement that MS transitioned Windows with as little disruption as they did, with all sorts of good and bad incentives. It’s a wonder Windows even still works, much less keeping such a large majority of install base. Obviously it’s not my favorite software in the world, but I’m thoroughly impressed with what the devs have pulled off through a cartoonish timeline of priority shifts with unbelievable backcompat expectations.
- 95/98 are a OS on their own although still having quite some old DOS code in there.
All others versions are following the NT tree.
NT 4.0 for non-x86 hardware deserves a honorable mention despite the fact i'm absolutely not a Microsoft fan. It was quite impressive during it's time, but hardly to be seen anywhere.
I agree 95 was a huge step relatively, but agree it was ~on par with my preferred Mac contemporary. Granted it does deserve mention for licensing music by Brian Eno… and a button licensed by another famous musician.
Microsoft had to switch the ways drivers work for some very necessary security reasons. This led to many hardware manufacturers just not making new drivers or slapping together the shitiest thing and hoping it worked. Took a few years but eventually everyone had new hardware (with decent compatible drivers), at which point 7 came out which is basically Vista with a new skin.
Hell, at the end its life an up to date Vista was actually pretty decent.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2008/03/the-vista-capable-de...
So instead of having everyone working together to make an OS where managed stacks take the main role, as Google has managed to push no matter what, regarding Android and ChromeOS, we got Longhorn's demise and its ideas being redone in COM and C++, WinDev darlings.
Then Windows 8 came along and decided flat squares were the only option anybody could use, removing theme transparency support altogether.
SOS as always, the new guy knows better than the old one, but by time time all the edge cases get reimplmented it consumes 100x the ram and runs 1/10 as fast and is just as unmaintainable, if not worse because now its written with 20 layers of OO or functional abstractions in some interpreted language that is a giant mess. Which is why when the next new guy joins its all "garbage code".
Sometimes KISS is best, and it should generally be a requirement that before your allowed to throw the code away you have to refactor it a couple of times.
Then the abomination that is Windows 8 came along and took an enormous and terribly corrosive dump on the the party. Windows has been a conundrum to me ever since. It just doesn't feel right anymore like it used to with 2k, XP, and Win7.
I'm a bit sad about the decline, having spent many thousands of hours completely plugged in to Windows.. Every wish, only a click or keystroke away.
R.I.P. FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8
(for the youngn's: this is the everlasting devils0wn pirate cd key for Windows XP serial number. How awesome would it be if it also worked for a future version of Windows?)
Definitely would be awesome if it becomes the placeholder KMS client key (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/get-started...)
I've reached the stage where I want my computer to just work, but it's still a fascinating place to check out from time to time.
I remember going to a MS sponsored talk on campus when it was in beta and we got free beta copies that were labeled NT 5 Beta!
Traded that for a copy of original Starcraft. Now, I wish I would have kept it.
No, my Windows 11 system doesn't use a Microsoft Account. No, I don't get ads on Windows (web search and suggestions are off, e.g., turn Windows Search settings to "classic"). All of the annoying stuff takes very little time to disable. And let's not pretend that Windows 7 didn't have people looking to turn off things about it they found annoying. [1]
Don't forget that the system requirements for Windows actually decreased after 7 when Microsoft optimized it for lower spec devices. Windows 7 isn't actually all that well optimized compared to 8/8.1/10/11. Windows 10 and 11 are much better able to take advantage of hardware enhancements on modern chips that are vastly different than the hardware available over 10 years ago. How many x86 processors had big.LITTLE architecture in 2009? Because that's what Intel is shipping now.
Don't forget about all the things that are massively antiquated about Windows 7 like the legacy control panel with no search function, lack of multiple desktops, lack of basic built-ins like a PDF reader, garbage command prompt and powershell, troubleshooting wizard that did nothing, Windows Update still being relatively disruptive and unreliable.
Don't forget about all the things that are actually REALLY good about Windows 11 like the game bar, task manager, Linux tooling and aliases (can you run ls ~/ | grep example in a Windows 7 shell without additional software?)/PowerShell 7/SSH being preinstalled, expanded and improved window management, very clean and minimal visual design, Windows Hello biometrics (I can SSH to my Linux server with a key stored in 1Password, automatically authenticated with my fingerprint when I run the SSH command (I don't have to open 1Password manually), using the built-in Windows SSH client, can Windows 7 do that??)
Windows 7 looked good because Vista was so unfinished and inappropriately matched to the contemporary hardware of the time, but in reality it wasn't anything particularly special and had plenty of missing and frustrating aspects.
[1] https://www.maketecheasier.com/disable-annoying-things-in-wi...
Ironically, I haven't made the jump to 11 yet just because my decade old Dell has an i7 that's been remarkably resilient for the kind of work I do on it.
My favorite thing about Windows is the backwards compatibility. I had a 2005 era Dell laptop that had come with XP. I think I paid $35 for an upgrade to Win7 after running the beta. Had the Win8 beta on there, which upgraded to a full version for free, and eventually upgraded to Win10 freely somehow as well. By that time, it struggled to run more than a web browser, and the internal wifi card no longer functioned, but it was remarkable that the upgrades all just worked.
And I've got some pretty nice Firewire audio hardware that runs flawlessly on Windows 10 despite the last driver for it having been released in 2006.
Maybe it's just me, but it gives me the feeling that the OS is actively working against me. I'm still having some configuration to do on Linux (hybrid graphics are fun and so is audio for my setup), but it's something caused by having so many options and limited time of contributors. On Windows, this is because the OS is trying to extract as much money as possible from me and that kind of adversarial relationship is not what I want to have with software that manages all of my data.
I totally understand that some people prefer FOSS but it seems to turn into portraying commercial software in a distorted way.
For being 100% free as in beer software with no profitable hardware ecosystem behind it (macOS), Windows 11 bothers you relatively minimally, all with things that are easily dismissed.
Selling things isn't by definition amoral or adversarial. Someone who decides to search with Bing or store their data on OneDrive is getting a solution to their problem.
Even open source non-profit products like Firefox and Wikipedia try to sell products or donations to financially support development.
The first aspect is that I, as paying user, am getting monetized even further with ads. The default software might be useful, but it's still not what I'm paying money for. If you can't support software at that price, just raise the price instead of deploying sleazy monetization techniques! But for that aspect only I agree; this is dislikeable behavior, but nothing to call Windows adversarial about.
The second problem however, is that Microsoft has crossed the line multiple times now. I have found Skype and Candy Crush (!) installed on a fresh Windows install; the latter definitely falls under "shady mobile game selling gambling tokens". The Windows 7->10 upgrade nags were also far beyond reasonable behavior for what I'd still call "reputable commercial software". Windows will also siphon my data by default and I have no way to fully disable that without third-party software and even then, a new update might include new ways which I then need to keep up with blocking.
Now, I still use Windows for when I need to, but I really don't trust Microsoft with my data anymore. Even if they most likely behave if I spent an hour configuring the system, trusting my data to such a leaky and adversarial platform that has behaved badly multiple times feels like just keeping up an abusive friendship and hoping that nothing goes wrong. YMMV, though, depending on what you like and your threat scenario using Windows might be perfectly fine for you and if so, more power to you!
I haven’t met a single person who pays for Windows. In 2022 it’s effectively a free OS. That’s why there’s advertising/upselling.
That being said, yes, most people (in my friend group) did not explicitly pay for Windows, but they bought devices with an included license that the OEM paid for. So they did not directly send money to Microsoft, but they still payed for the OS indirectly (just like they indirectly supported AMD or Intel, for example).
It's actually infuriating.
https://www.xda-developers.com/windows-11-build-22621755-tas...
But what could possibly be the point of changing something that works?? Buy a new machine, spend weeks or months reinstalling software, try to find alternatives for things that no longer work, and for what benefit?
Yes one can run `ls ~/ | grep example` in a Windows 7 shell, and ok, it requires additional software, but once that additional software has been installed, it is done. What's the point of installing a new OS so that functionalities that you already have, become "native"? Who cares?
Same for PDF (Sumatra) or SSH (putty), etc. etc. I have a stable system that I know intimately, on old hardware that I also know well. I don't see the need to be running after new things like a dog after a ball.
I see this the other way around: Microsoft released enhancements and security patches for $0, and my computer can run the software.
What could possibly be the point of not changing my software where a new version that does more things is available for free?
Imagine a car manufacturer offering to give you a new car and take you old one with no significant catch and saying no. Why would I do that?
Resistance of change for resistance of change's sake alone is something that is a major pet peeve for me. It represents a negative personality trait in my mind. In my opinion, the day I refuse to use something solely because it's new, different, or scary is the day I've turned into an old grump.
I love new things that are actually new and that bring a clear benefit; Windows 10 isn't "new", it's the same thing with the UI arranged in a slightly different way for no reason.
A computer is like a hammer. When you're used to one, and you suddenly decide to use another one, it takes time to feel its proper balance and use it with the same efficiency as the previous one. You can have two hammers that you use regularly; but changing hammers every year just because there's a new one with a handle in a different color is absurd IMHO.
The feature/enhancement list of Windows 10 and its constant iterative updates and now Windows 11 is probably hundreds of items. How am I supposed to communicate to you that it's more than just a new UI when an operating system is made up of so many different pieces?
It's hard to "win" against arguments like this because your side of the argument amounts to "I haven't seen it but I assume it has to be basically the same" or "from the screenshots I can see it's a new UI and it's basically just Windows."
Here's one: Does Windows 7 have any low-level optimization for big little architecture in Intel's new chips? https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-and-intel-confirm-wind...
To win this argument I'd have to come up with some big feature list and hope there are a few that resonate with you, but you can easily dismiss it as "I don't need that."
No, it didn't take me weeks or months to upgrade from Windows 10 to 11. I clicked a button and I walked away. The computer updates itself. Automatically, at night, when I'm asleep.
I upgraded to Windows 11 relatively early and nothing broke. No workflow was disrupted. Windows' backwards compatibility is legendary.
You're looking at this like upgrading isn't worth the lift, but that's backwards. Upgrading is so easy and just gives you more stuff with basically no downside (and Microsoft fixes big complaints about new releases quickly these days because they take feedback and release continuously – they have a whole app just for providing feedback).
But it's funny the one bug feature you mention is "low level optimization for Intel new chips". So indeed, it's not just a software thing: in order to fully appreciate the greatness of that new OS I would have to buy a new CPU (not free) and all that comes with it.
I don't see the need to do that, but if you want to do it please do! But why does it upset you if others don't want to upgrade, and why would you label them luddites and grumpy old farts, is my question.
Can't we agree to disagree?
And that's my baseline for an OS: can it run programs. And thanks to the absolute ubiquitous of Windows for the last 30 years everything was made with Windows in mind.
(Not to mention my computer works perfectly well but since it doesn't have a TPM it can't run 11 at all)
I really don’t understand everyone’s issue. I get they try to push you towards a cloud account, but you don’t have to have one, and the ads can be much easier excised than the bloatware they used to install.
Do I wish they wouldn’t try to funnel you? Sure, but every tech company does this and no-one bats an eye.
I’m not excusing it, just saying it’s standard behaviour in 2022 and objectively I’d rather click through those rare funnels than not if it gets me modern protections like memory isolation and secure boot.
Also I really like the new UI, but I realise I’m an outlier on this.
A simple Google search refutes this. Ok, if you count running some cmd magic as meaning they don't require you to have a Microsoft account, we're never going to agree. For Joe Bloggs, a Microsoft account is required and there is no way around it.
That said, maybe Joe Bloggs is better off. If he’s not savvy enough to know the difference / be able to Google around it, he might be better of with an online account given he’ll probably not understand why certain things don’t work the same on his machine or care about the implications of taking his account online.
XP did mature into something that was decent, but the initial release of XP was just an uglier and more system hungry version of 2000. And thus XP drive me to run Linux as my primary OS.
But back when 2000 was around, most other OSs were terrible. Linux was getting close but still had a lot of rough edges. BeOS was awesome but you could tell it was a dying company. Apple were struggling too: MacOS 9 was less stable than Windows 9x (and that’s saying something!) and OS X took a couple of releases to really take off. Atari were dead. Amiga was basically only ram by enthusiasts. Yet Windows 2000 arrived and it felt genuinely like a next generation OS for its time.
Windows 2000 took NT4 and focused on bettering the stuff that didn’t work rather than breaking the stuff that did. Often little changes like adding short cut keys to Notepad.exe. Whereas every version of Windows since has done far too much GUI overhaul (and always to the detriment of UX in my personal opinion) while doing very little to improve my core complaints with the OS.
I get this is going to be my subjective opinion, just like Windows 7 is yours. But I did wasn’t to share a counterpoint to the praise of Windows 7.
Microsofties: Please put them ALL back to match Windows10, acknowledge the heritage of the previous version, and the years of keyboard muscle memory now flushed down the drain
example, let me use the arrow keys again in popup dialogs (arrow left+right keys now do nothing... have to use the tab or shift tab or mouse in dialogs)
Another one, snip it doesn't work properly when using two monitors.
Doesn't anyone on Windows 11 team afford having two HDPI monitors?
7 Mostly was allright because of huge increase in availabe RAM on laptops.
UWP was great from the point of view that .NET Native is what .NET 1.0 should have been, and C++/CX was the very first time Microsoft had anything similar to C++ Builder.
However it was horrible managed, and asking everyone to keep rewriting their code isn't something that makes Windows dev community jump of joy.
Now WinUI is too late for the party, too buggy, too many features lacking.
For XP I really like the unofficial SP4 service pack which rolls up all post-SP3 updates into a single executable, with or without .NET. The later POS-only patches are also available. It makes it really simple to bring an old system "up to date", even if the last update was a couple years ago.
These machines are just for fun of course and I don't do real work on them, and I'm behind NAT and monitor my traffic, so I'm not really worried about these systems.
I think that the ball is on everyone still sticking on it - It was clear that Windows XP was supposed to be supported only for 10 years and they relent it and extend it to be 14 years. At that point it's clear that the companies who can't move, especially big ones, are the ones who are reckless.
He tried to argue that the kinds of ancient malware that XP would be vulnerable to (Blaster, Sasser, ILOVEYOU etc) were somehow still threats to be concerned about in 2022 (nearly 2023!) against modern operating systems because "I literally wrote my thesis on attacking Windows Defender"
Has anyone (aside from Dancoot on youtube) tried to actually threat model this kind of thing? I find it hard to believe that 20-30 year old malware can even function let alone be a threat either to modern machines or modern networks. There's no way my Windows 98 gaming PC is going to breach the security of my Win10 laptop
Just bury the body already, let winxp rest in peace, please
If you're running legacy OSes, you're most definitely not playing recent games with DRM or doing anything that can't be done on a recent Linux system.
Kernel 5.15 still seems to be incompatible with running two monitors on a GTX 1080TI with any of the proprietary nvidia drivers I've tried.
Nvidia tends to be a bit of a no-no when it comes to linux these days because of the wayland fiasco (and others), although it might be getting better with their latest opensource driver efforts. Who knows, but the fact does remain that linux's refusal to have a binary driver ABI fsk's anything that doesn't have an opensource driver, so usually just make sure one exists before even trying the HW.
So, yah linux is still shit, but at this point it might have finally reached the point where its the least shitty if your careful. Largely because the competitors are doing their darnest to destroy their own offerings while chasing features/etc no one actually wants (ads anyone?).
I mean, my laptop doesn't overheat daily in my bag when its booted to Linux, but yeah, Windows is so easy. /s
* Sleeping doesn't work, hibernate sometimes work
* Keyboard buttons for screen brightness doesn't work
* Ambient light sensor doesn't work
* Vsync doesn't work
* Processor always highly clocked, draining battery
I was able to fix some of the issues in Ubuntu by compiling kernel addons of some sort. When I switched to Arch I could with the help of their Wiki fix all of the issues, but there was lot of text config files to edit, and some more compiling of kernel stuff. Even after that I still couldn't get vsync to work properly. Watching youtube while the screen is tearing all the time is very annoying.
If you want to run linux you should get a laptop that is validated to work, like framework or validated dell laptops. At least then you might only need to fix one or two issues.
Which zenbook? Ill try to find one here to validate explicitly.
Its hard to have these conversations sometimes because people use old versions of meh distros and then carry their anecdotes forward for years.
I literally cannot find a Zenbook on the market that has hardware that should have these issues. I'd really, really like to know what custom kernel patches (really?) you were taking to get hardware to work.
When you say booting in your bag, are you describing the act of intentionally booting it without removing it from the bag while the bag is open (because taking it out of the bag is a surprising amount of seemingly unnecessary effort) or the "why is my bag warm to the touch oh shit my compy's on" surprise wake from sleep while the bag is closed (because, at least in Windows, there are some events that can wake a compy from S3 sleep at bad times, such as moving it, not moving it, or exposing it to oxygen)?
The latter was quite jarring the first time it happened and so far the only workaround I've found is hibernating the computer before packing it up (which isn't a big deal, but bothers me anyway, because I don't move it often enough to make hibernation my default "lid closed" action).
Linus did a whole video on it - you have to unplug your laptop, then close it, or risk a serious issue.
Just one example of hoops that Windows users become conditioned to.
It's even easier in any other distro.
Put short, I cannot corroborate your experience at all.
(I have been on and off Linux the last 10 years due to gaming, but it seems I will be able to stay this time, Proton often performs better than natively Windows)
Put short, you transpose your success to the whole universe.
Now, in retrospect, my tone was inappropriate, I'm sorry. The very fact we have such different impressions of Linux demonstrates it's still a bit messier than it could be.
I have actually lived through that era, and I can't remember there being negative sentiment about XP. I don't know about the dark corners of the internet, but the people in my circles were neutral about XP, hated Vista, loved 7, hated 8, hated 10 and hate 11
to this day, the only criticism of XP I saw is about the UI, which doesn't make sense to me - switching it was a matter of 3 clicks
and no one seems to care.
I suspect that's largely because of learned helplessness and the bias that search engines and the like seem to have developed. Instead of piles of critical articles about all the worst parts, we get SEO'd sites parroting the same unbearably positive marketing copy about how much "better" Win11 is.
I, on the other hand, clearly remember a huge wave of disgust and resentment towards XP right after it came out. Slow and bloated, with hideous, gimmicky visuals, it had been an object of all kinds of ridicule and criticisms by "sophisticated" computer users.
From memory XP was the first "phone home" windows version which required some form of online registration. I stopped using windows at home or admining it around then.
Also there was a ton of compatibility issues, at the time Microsoft saw Win98 as the biggest competitor to XP and it wasn't until SP2 that XP was seen as good.
Funny enough, a quick search for "windows xp fisher price" has this Ars Technica article about exactly that topic (people hating Windows XP when it first came out):
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/memor...
Starting with Windows 8, they removed that option completely.
Even Vista had its goals in the right place (it was a broken mess, but it meant well).
Windows 8 had so many improvements to the core O/S (even Task Manager was a massive leap forward in 8!) that were just utterly undermined by that horrific metro UI. It must have been so frustrating to have worked there at that time then have some idiot force a touch screen interface on to it that didn’t make any sense.
Windows 10 resolved most of this, and Windows 11 fixed a lot of the fundamental issues with the security model that have plagued Windows for decades.
The coloured "rubber" gadgets were very nice. Those haters surely dislike Comic Sans too!
Comic Sans for when I’m happy, Papyrus for when I’m in a mood. Easy peasy.
It went from a Toys R Us to a slick Lamborghini dealership.
Or how about some of that Olive Green action? Get you the muted natural look, you know what’s up.
2020s Microsoft: "Where do we want you to go today?"
2000s Microsoft: "Where do you want to try to go today?"
2010s Microsoft: "Where did you go today ?"
2020s Microsoft: "Where do we want you to go today?"
/completed that for you
Windows subsystem for linux has 2 flavors. WSL1 was more of the whole system call on NT thing, kind of. WSL2 is a lightweight hyper-v VM with an MS customized Linux kernel with a bunch of tweaks to do cool shit.
Also
>CBL-Mariner (in which CBL stands for Common Base Linux)[3] is a free and open-source Linux distribution that Microsoft has developed. It is the base container OS for Microsoft Azure services[4][5] and the graphical component of WSL
“The existence of this site shouldn’t be taken as an endorsement to continue using unsupported OSes. You should stick to a supported OS such as Windows 10 or 11 (or, try Linux?!). However, this service exists anyway in recognition that using these OSes is sometimes necessary to run legacy hardware/software, or just interesting to play around with.”
Presumably they knew they would get a lot of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfUEb_neu3U
In all honesty though they’ll probably have some old version of WSUS still running on prem anyways. Well that and a large collection of devices they aren’t allowed to update or secure at all.
Indeed, I knew it was an important resource many people would need, but also that I had to make clear that getting fully patched up on XP or 7 is of course nowhere near the same as running a current OS with 10-20 more years of security innovation baked in. Although I do try to assume most of the target audience have this level of understanding about security already.
most of the results are related to that
Is anyone actually writing exploits for these ancient systems? I wouldn't be surprised if it is actually safer from non-targeted attacks.
Remember these OS required quite sophisticated antivirus with up to date dbs. Goog luck installing working antivirus on these systems
But, it wouldn't surprise me at all if a couple large (or important) customers with some special cases have some kind of incident support contracts which basically dictate that MS fixes exploits or bugs in embedded systems/whatever. Its happened in the past, so no reason to think that some nuke plant tied to windows7 can't get a timezone update or whatever in a couple years after paying $$$$$ for it.
Extended Security Update Year 3 - End Date 2024-10-08
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/windows...
and you also have 0patch
https://blog.0patch.com/2022/10/two-more-years-of-critical-s...
I've got an old netbook and decided to put back on the OS it originally came with, Windows 7 Starter. I was so surprised when I couldn't run updates; I finally attributed it to having old security certificates, but couldn't figure out how to update them, and some important updates that I installed on other computers (a number of HTTPS sites are impossible to see without the right certs) and copied over would not install. Such a pain.
And here, just like that, Windows 7 SP1 is installing.
To those who made this: Thank you so much!
Edit: would need to pull from https://archive.org/search.php?query=wsusoffline&sin= I guess
Instead, being closed source, Microsoft can just force users to update to systems that they don't want, by withholding critical security fixes and features that are required to use the modern web. And there's almost nothing the users can do about it, because they have no meaningful control over the system they are running.
It's pure genius.
to play the devil's advocate, you're saying that microsoft should continuously make critical security fixes for old OS versions, add updates/features with which modern web requires to function, all while not taking any income except for the initial payment purchase price?
No business could do this.
Edit: to make the point, i would say that microsoft _should_ charge a subscription for old versions of windows, and use that revenue to upkeep it, instead of pushing what they're pushing right now.
I wonder if there is a sizable position easily identifiable Linux 2.6.x running out there.
I wear shoes, coats, sweaters that are over 15 years old. My main stereo system is 25 years old; even the Sonos components (that I hate) are over 15 years old and still work ok.
I kept a motorbike for 25 years, and then eventually it was stolen (which meant the thieves still found it interesting).
I don't understand why tech that works should be thrown out just because there's new tech. New tech has to offer incredible new possibilities to offset the hassle of change.
My main system runs Win7 on hardware that's 10-15 years old and it does everything. I also have a couple of laptops running Win10 and I have yet to find what they do better, except being annoying and "different" for the sake of it.
Windows 7 ESU ends January 2023
Should be interesting to see what all the corporations still using it do.
Also ATMs
Seconds, minutes, hours?
Time to fire up a VM I think.
Maybe they were hosting on XP. Didn’t ask.
I wonder how much malware now just refuses to run on XP because it attempts to use functions that were introduced in later versions.
Probably the wrong place to ask, but this seems like such a fun experiment to try but maybe more difficult than I initially thought.
This includes the vast majority of ads which are the main way to get such malware. Also chances are even if a bad ad (or other vulnerability) hits you, it wont work because it'd be designed for browsers people actually use :-P.
I used to for fun 2001 to 2006 or so, run a fresh install of 98se which I had burned to CD, recovery was about 20 mins perhaps a bit less, (read however long it took to copy a 600 meg image to hard drive) and cruised the net. No security as such, just seeing what was out there, what ports being probed etc. I rarely had any issues. Yes of course when I was tormenting some large wannabe hacker forum (read script kiddies) where one or more had decided to prove themselves by attacking a couple of harmless looking forums, yes I think they managed to get in pretty quickly iirc about five minutes. For giggles after a couple of times (they got quicker) I switched over to a live linux cd ... but since one of their members had outdone themselves and annoyed people who unlike myself quite happy with my new chew toys, ... I figured just a matter of time before my fun would end ... their forum strangely packed it at end of week :) In all of it, my only issue albeit a very serious one, was contaminated backups, which occurred when was when I was "tagged" in 2003 with something, which was so unique that last time I scanned a copy of the infected system in 2009-10, it still didn't raise any flags with the latest anti malware or root kit detection available at the time.
I do wish they worked differently though. They're trying to build the entire thing from scratch all at once, but it would've made much more sense if they took a Windows installation and started replacing Microsoft components one by one with their own until there are none left. This would guarantee 100% compatibility with everything imaginable, because you get complete integration testing for free, and probably won't break any licenses either. Didn't the Haiku project use this approach with BeOS?
XD