Yeah, Steve, there was a run of sites that were spreading malware in ads. It was a pain in the neck to clean a couple of them that ESET identified, but wasn’t confident that they could remove without damage as they were rootkits. I got rid of them, but it wasn’t fun. I still need an XP machine for a client’s work, so I don’t have much choice, as the guy is also a friend after decades of working together.
You find the feature useful, Hipparchia, but I found it distracting. It depends on how you use the computer and what you are attempting to accomplish. As long as I can turn them off I don’t care, other than paying for stuff I don’t need or want.
]]>it took me a while to get used to the transparency thingy and the various problems associated with it, like clicking on the wrong x, but now i kinda like the look and feel of it. of course, the only reason i got used to it in the first place is because it took me so long to discover how to turn it off that i became hooked having on the open window thumbnails first.
]]>The last Windows I dealt with before I gave it up was XP, mostly because I hated Vista on Stella’s computer and refused to “upgrade”. I got hammered, hard, by a virus that got past NOD32. I don’t spend time on known dangerous sites or pr0n sites, so it apparently came from an ad on a presumed friendly site. Life is too short to put up with that BS.
]]>Regarding staying with Windows XP vs. moving to the new Vista/7 kernel, after spending some time digging into the innards of these operating systems for our software at work, you can keep your XP. It’s insecure, it’s got gaping holes in its functionality in some fundamental respects, and as an operating system kernel had clearly reached the end of its road. Sometimes I think the Vista/7 kernel is *too* secure, it takes major gyrations to get drivers signed for example (without which you can’t run them without disabling major parts of the innards of the system) and I never did figure out how to get VirtualBox running as a service with admin escalated privileges, but at least they tried. XP is a sieve. You can virus it by sneezing in its general direction. You can virus a computer running 7, but not easily — you have to trick the user into clicking on a security escalation, else your attempt to virus the OS is completely futile. While there are users stupid enough to do this, they can’t do it on a network if you’ve turned off the security escalations in your domain policies, period — whereas there were ways to bypass domain policies in XP due to its insecure innards.
Frankly, from a network administrator’s point of view, I wish XP would just die, already. Most XP boxes out there are so compromised by viruses and spyware that they’re pretty much useless anyhow other than as a way of getting your company blacklisted by every email server on the planet due to all the penis spam they’re spewing out.
Does this mean I like Windows 7? Not really. It’s still a mess. It’s just a *better* mess than XP for some fundamental technological reasons, especially when it comes to security. The sooner the last XP system falls off the Internet the better, IMHO.
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