Windows 7 vs Windows 10??

[beanflying]

linux

NO 

I refuse to make my life more complicated than it already is. Having to create virtual machines and trick an operating system to run some of the software I use just isn't where I want to go.

[pcmad]

come to the dark side linux is calling you   

else i would go for win 7 as its good on resources and microsoft will spy on you less

or even xp

anyway so what if updates stop you are still safe dont taken in by there scare tactics

[james_s]

I'm almost to where I could just use Linux for everything. Actually I could if I really wanted to right now but frankly I still find Win7 to be a bit nicer and more polished.

Win10 looks and feels very rough around the edges to me though, it reminds me of Linux from 10-15 years ago, at least it did the last time I had to use it. Linux improving slightly while Windows regressed makes that switch a lot easier. If I have to get used to a whole new OS and lose the visual polish of Win7 I have little reason to continue to put up with MS and their heavy handed tactics. It feels like they've tried to copy all the things I hate about Apple and forgot to copy most of what I like.

[beanflying]

come to the dark side linux is calling you   

else i would go for win 7 as its good on resources and microsoft will spy on you less

or even xp

anyway so what if updates stop you are still safe dont taken in by there scare tactics

Still NO  Windoze 7 (Windows 8 will but lets all agree it SUCKED  )won't run the software I use on my main box and as of a few month ago I remove my last 7 box from use as it wouldn't handle an upgrade or the software I needed without a workaround.

[Ranayna]

Coming back to my early reply in the thread

I have now taken the plunge of installing Windows 10.
Linux is still, somewhat sadly, not an option for me, yet. I play too many games and have to use Windows at work.

A couple of observations, after one day of using Windows 10 (1809):

First of all, with a slow internet connecting, installing Windows 10 sucks. I have only a 6 MBit/s DSL connection, and downloading updates takes a loooooong time. The stupid thing is that this is a bandwidth hog, taking everything it can get, no matter that other active processes are currently using bandwidth. A running download for example was throttled down to single digit kBytes/s... I hope this calms down in the next couple of days where I just leave the PC on over day.

The UI seems to be slightly bigger. Especially the Taskbar set to two-rows is obviously larger than under Windows 7, but I think the titlebar is also bigger. The scaling is set to 125% (same as I had it under 7), I have noticeably less screen space than before.

To disable Telemetry as far as I can, and get rid of unwanted features, I used O&O Shutup 10, a small portable executable. This cannot fully disable Telemetry, but reduces it to a minimum without you having to fiddle around in dozens of menus. It can also get rid of various features, like bing connected search or Cortana as far as possible.

I also disabled Hibernation and Fast Boot. Hibernation wastes 32GB of disk space in my case, and Fast Boot can wreck dual-boot machines. And even with Fast Boot disabled, the box boots somewhat faster that Windows 7 did.
There is still some tweaking to do, I am sure of it. But so far it seems to work, and most obvious annoyances are disabled. Let's see how it will behave after the update to 1909.

All in all it took me an evening to install (including a thorough physical cleaning of the computer) and another evening to get the first stuff restored from backup and up an running again. Updates are hopefully completing today.  I have to admit: that was faster than I expected. This time also includes two curveballs I encountered: My QNAP NAS was still using an old firmware supporting SMB1 only, and Windows 10 would not connect. So that took an hour to update as well. And it seems my big internal storage harddisk is about to die...

Oh, and I used my Windows 7 Ultimate key during installation, so that still works.

[SilverSolder]

To me, the biggest issue with updating to Win 10 is all the older PCs and printers that are not supported in Win 10...   you just know you will be spending ages trying to make it all work, and some of it will never work...

[james_s]

The huge UI elements is a plague across all sorts of software. There's an arms race where monitor resolutions increase which ought to allow more information to be displayed at a time, but then UI designers just make everything bigger to gobble up those pixels. I could fit more information on a 1280x1024 display in the late 90s than I can on a 4K display now. I'm always shrinking things down and finding they won't even go small enough, normally I zoom my browser out to 70-80%. I hate huge chunky UI elements, they remind me of the Duplo blocks for children too young to use Legos.

[Karel]

The huge UI elements is a plague across all sorts of software. There's an arms race where monitor resolutions increase which ought to allow more information to be displayed at a time, but then UI designers just make everything bigger to gobble up those pixels. I could fit more information on a 1280x1024 display in the late 90s than I can on a 4K display now. I'm always shrinking things down and finding they won't even go small enough, normally I zoom my browser out to 70-80%. I hate huge chunky UI elements, they remind me of the Duplo blocks for children too young to use Legos.

I couldn't agree more. Also, I don't like "flat" themes. You always have to guess if something is clickable or not...

[SilverSolder]

The huge UI elements is a plague across all sorts of software. There's an arms race where monitor resolutions increase which ought to allow more information to be displayed at a time, but then UI designers just make everything bigger to gobble up those pixels. I could fit more information on a 1280x1024 display in the late 90s than I can on a 4K display now. I'm always shrinking things down and finding they won't even go small enough, normally I zoom my browser out to 70-80%. I hate huge chunky UI elements, they remind me of the Duplo blocks for children too young to use Legos.

I couldn't agree more. Also, I don't like "flat" themes. You always have to guess if something is clickable or not...

Agree in spades.  When you can only display a list of 3 eBay items on a 24" monitor, you know the lunatics have taken over the asylum.

[james_s]

Yes I hate flat themes too, they threw out decades of UI development and visual cues that just worked in order to chase the latest fad. Apple ruined the beautiful plush look of iOS with version 7, Microsoft took flat to a whole new level with Win8, it's all so bland and drab, it reminds me of Win 3.0 on 16 color VGA which I'm just old enough to remember using. Actually even 3.0 had some nice visual cues and was totally usable on just 640x480 pixels.

[beanflying]

And why Windoze suits most of the world this mornings 'update' downloaded and said hey you need to reboot me. Picked a time while I made a coffee and when I sat backdown all was ready to go again. Doesn't mean the sneaky f'ers at Microsnot haven't automagically changed my settings or privacy but it is a no fuss operating system in most cases.

To me, the biggest issue with updating to Win 10 is all the older PCs and printers that are not supported in Win 10...   you just know you will be spending ages trying to make it all work, and some of it will never work...

I used that argument to myself with XP and an old plotter eventually common sense one out and the then seldom used A3 plotter became salvage and I picked up an ex lease I3 for $120 AUD with then Windows 7. Same box is now happily running W10 and strapped to my Laser Cutter and will eventually run my larger CNC Router code as well. Leaving the good box for the heavy lifting before it gets to that box.

[SilverSolder]

The way to migrate if you have a lot of old equipment is probably to run Win 7 as a virtual machine on a Win 10 box,  for those applications (and drivers) that won't work any other way.

[Mr. Scram]

The way to migrate if you have a lot of old equipment is probably to run Win 7 as a virtual machine on a Win 10 box,  for those applications (and drivers) that won't work any other way.

You'd obviously have to segregate those Windows 7 VMs from the rest to prevent them from becoming entry points into your network.

[Red Squirrel]

Windows 10 is ok for entertainment purposes such as a HTPC or gaming machine other thing where you're mostly just consuming media that is full screen and not really interacting with the OS.   If you're interacting with the OS itself and doing real work it's just a terrible experience and Linux is much better.   I have a Windows 7 machine I use for gaming and will stay on 7 for as long as I can, but all my work really happens in Linux.  I switched around the time Windows 8 came out since I absolutely hated it and the direction MS was trying to take Windows.   Windows 10 is a bit better than 8 but I still hate the UI.  Too much white, too much empty space, too much gray fuzzy text, everything is hard to find and hidden away, etc.  Just hate it. You can customize some things if you use Classic Shell such as putting in a proper start menu, but that only goes so far.

Just because you have an outdated OS on your network does not somehow make it easier for hackers to be in, provided you are actually using a NAT firewall at minimum (and you should be!) and not just port forwarding all the things.  If you port forward anything to a machine, that machine should be on a separate vlan, no matter what OS it's running, even Linux, as it's not the OS that matters, but the security of the specific application that is listening on the port.  If there is a remote code execution flaw or anything then they could get in that way.   For example, even a VPN server.  Remember heartbleed?  Even if that's patched, who knows if there may be other exploits that are just not known yet.  You never want to rely on just being up to date as it's never actually up to date.  So any machine that is accessible from the outside should be segregated from the rest of the network.

[james_s]

I've said it before many times but I've cleaned up countless infections for people and not one of them yet has ever been an exploited vulnerability. It has always been the user installing something, every single time. Didn't matter if the OS was updated or not because the attack vector bypassed all of that, exploiting the user instead.

If we were talking a server out there exposed to the public then absolutely, keeping it fully patched is essential. For a typical personal computer sitting inside a home network it's almost irrelevant. There's no reason for anyone to even bother trying to exploit unpatched old PCs because there is SO much low hanging fruit in gullible users that are SO much easier to exploit. This happens so often that it's silly to focus on OS exploits, doing so is like focusing on protecting yourself from a lightning strike and then driving down a busy freeway drunk with a mobile phone in your hand. Lightning strikes can happen but they're rare enough as to not be worthy of being your primary focus.

[Red Squirrel]

That is so true as well.  A lot of the "exploits" are design.  You double click a file, it will open! If the file is malicious, well it will do bad stuff, and no amount of updates is going to stop that short of some kind of high end AI that can analyse every bit of code.

[beanflying]

You can't expect any operating system to protect against idiots or those really determined to do harm. This is not unique to W7, W10 or even Linux. Going back into the dim dark past crashing a HP3 or 9000 at Uni 'for fun' was easy when you knew how. 

[BravoV]

Noob question, in windows, will running a nasty program, but NOT as administrator level privilege level,  can do harm to the critical OS components like kernel, device drivers, booting and etc ?

[james_s]

You can't expect any operating system to protect against idiots or those really determined to do harm. This is not unique to W7, W10 or even Linux. Going back into the dim dark past crashing a HP3 or 9000 at Uni 'for fun' was easy when you knew how. 

Nor do I. My point is simply that all the chicken littles screaming that the sky is falling when it comes to people running outdated operating systems at home are either misguided or in some cases on the payroll of companies that benefit from consumers always buying the latest and greatest. Consumer PCs are rarely hit by exploits in the OS, it's just not a big concern. Having everything up to date can give a false sense of security, it's still ultimately up to the user.

Servers and specific high value targets are where people exploit security bugs in the software.

[Mr. Scram]

Noob question, in windows, will running a nasty program, but NOT as administrator level privilege level,  can do harm to the critical OS components like kernel, device drivers, booting and etc ?

It depends. A lot of malware will attempt privilege escalation. That's a fancy term for gaining a higher privilege level either directly or in multiple steps by using vulnerabilities. If successful it can do things the original user can't.

[BravoV]

Noob question, in windows, will running a nasty program, but NOT as administrator level privilege level,  can do harm to the critical OS components like kernel, device drivers, booting and etc ?

It depends. A lot of malware will attempt privilege escalation. That's a fancy term for gaining a higher privilege level either directly or in multiple steps by using vulnerabilities. If successful it can do things the original user can't.

So there is no guarantee, say it can be done "easily" thru script kiddies, as it must be fully custom crafted right ?

[Mr. Scram]

Windows 10 is ok for entertainment purposes such as a HTPC or gaming machine other thing where you're mostly just consuming media that is full screen and not really interacting with the OS.   If you're interacting with the OS itself and doing real work it's just a terrible experience and Linux is much better.   I have a Windows 7 machine I use for gaming and will stay on 7 for as long as I can, but all my work really happens in Linux.  I switched around the time Windows 8 came out since I absolutely hated it and the direction MS was trying to take Windows.   Windows 10 is a bit better than 8 but I still hate the UI.  Too much white, too much empty space, too much gray fuzzy text, everything is hard to find and hidden away, etc.  Just hate it. You can customize some things if you use Classic Shell such as putting in a proper start menu, but that only goes so far.

Just because you have an outdated OS on your network does not somehow make it easier for hackers to be in, provided you are actually using a NAT firewall at minimum (and you should be!) and not just port forwarding all the things.  If you port forward anything to a machine, that machine should be on a separate vlan, no matter what OS it's running, even Linux, as it's not the OS that matters, but the security of the specific application that is listening on the port.  If there is a remote code execution flaw or anything then they could get in that way.   For example, even a VPN server.  Remember heartbleed?  Even if that's patched, who knows if there may be other exploits that are just not known yet.  You never want to rely on just being up to date as it's never actually up to date.  So any machine that is accessible from the outside should be segregated from the rest of the network.

Having an outdated or vulnerable device in your network is a veritable risk to it and the rest of the network. Plenty of actual real world attacks use unpatched machines as a stepping stone to the rest of the network. Granted, it's more common in larger scale attacks on enterprise level environments. Having an outdated OS is an excellent way of turning a temporary foothold into a permanent one though.

[Mr. Scram]

So there is no guarantee, say it can be done "easily" thru script kiddies, as it must be fully custom crafted right ?

Privilege escalation can be done by common malware encountered by the average consumer. It generally uses known exploits and therefore depends on users not having fully updated systems. Note that this can include third party programs like Photoshop or something like drivers.

[Mr. Scram]

I've said it before many times but I've cleaned up countless infections for people and not one of them yet has ever been an exploited vulnerability. It has always been the user installing something, every single time. Didn't matter if the OS was updated or not because the attack vector bypassed all of that, exploiting the user instead.

If we were talking a server out there exposed to the public then absolutely, keeping it fully patched is essential. For a typical personal computer sitting inside a home network it's almost irrelevant. There's no reason for anyone to even bother trying to exploit unpatched old PCs because there is SO much low hanging fruit in gullible users that are SO much easier to exploit. This happens so often that it's silly to focus on OS exploits, doing so is like focusing on protecting yourself from a lightning strike and then driving down a busy freeway drunk with a mobile phone in your hand. Lightning strikes can happen but they're rare enough as to not be worthy of being your primary focus.

The fact that you mainly clean up computers for inexperienced users or those with bad habits doesn't mean vulnerabilities aren't actively exploited in real life. They are. I'd invite anyone to Google search "actively exploited vulnerabilities". The flavour of this week is a vulnerability for Internet Explorer that was abused before a patch was released. The user is arguably the most important part of a secure system but expedient patching definitely is a vital part too.

https://threatpost.com/microsoft-actively-exploited-zero-day-bug/150992/

[Red Squirrel]

Windows 10 is ok for entertainment purposes such as a HTPC or gaming machine other thing where you're mostly just consuming media that is full screen and not really interacting with the OS.   If you're interacting with the OS itself and doing real work it's just a terrible experience and Linux is much better.   I have a Windows 7 machine I use for gaming and will stay on 7 for as long as I can, but all my work really happens in Linux.  I switched around the time Windows 8 came out since I absolutely hated it and the direction MS was trying to take Windows.   Windows 10 is a bit better than 8 but I still hate the UI.  Too much white, too much empty space, too much gray fuzzy text, everything is hard to find and hidden away, etc.  Just hate it. You can customize some things if you use Classic Shell such as putting in a proper start menu, but that only goes so far.

Just because you have an outdated OS on your network does not somehow make it easier for hackers to be in, provided you are actually using a NAT firewall at minimum (and you should be!) and not just port forwarding all the things.  If you port forward anything to a machine, that machine should be on a separate vlan, no matter what OS it's running, even Linux, as it's not the OS that matters, but the security of the specific application that is listening on the port.  If there is a remote code execution flaw or anything then they could get in that way.   For example, even a VPN server.  Remember heartbleed?  Even if that's patched, who knows if there may be other exploits that are just not known yet.  You never want to rely on just being up to date as it's never actually up to date.  So any machine that is accessible from the outside should be segregated from the rest of the network.

Having an outdated or vulnerable device in your network is a veritable risk to it and the rest of the network. Plenty of actual real world attacks use unpatched machines as a stepping stone to the rest of the network. Granted, it's more common in larger scale attacks on enterprise level environments. Having an outdated OS is an excellent way of turning a temporary foothold into a permanent one though.

You still need a way to gain access to that system though such as if it's acting as a server.  Then yes you want to separate that off from the rest of the network as it will be a risky system - even if it's fully up to date.    All systems are "outdated".  In 10 years from now, Windows 10 will be considered outdated.  Whatever flaws are in it then, exist today too (well unless they were introduced by another update, which happens).   You don't want to rely on only being "up to date" for your security measures as it's a very fragile one.  Even if you keep up with updates 100% of the time the minute they come out, it just means that you stopped being vulnerable - you were vulnerable the entire time before the update came out.   It's best to block the vulnerabilities from being accessed in first place.