Win XP vs Win 7 - an internet security debate.

[Foxi4]

Don't forget they went through a period of optimisation so they could run it on Arm, that was after Windows 7.

Microsoft phones and the xbox one run Windows 10.

Don't confuse the two builds. Also, XBO is x86_64, not ARM.

 

[smf]

Don't confuse the two builds. Also, XBO is x86_64, not ARM.

I'm not confused, I know they use different cpus. You understand it's mostly written in C & C++ and the same code is compiled for each platform right?

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Windows-Kernel-Internals/One-Windows-Kernel/ba-p/267142

Windows 10 is faster than Windows 7 in tests.

I have a eee pc with 2gb ram and an atom that includes an ancient intel graphics chip which struggles with Windows 10, but windows 7 was ok.

So there is a cut off, but a core 2 duo with 4gb of ram should be fine.

 

[Foxi4]

I'm not confused, I know they use different cpus. You understand it's mostly written in C & C++ and the same code is compiled for each platform right?

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Windows-Kernel-Internals/One-Windows-Kernel/ba-p/267142

Sure. Do you understand that your results vary greatly depending on the platform, especially on a unified kernel? The more platforms you support simultaneously the less specialised the final product is. That's neither here nor there, I chose to stop engaging bleh on the 7 vs. 10 meme because it's a fairly popular myth among power users. Windows 10 had a lot of the fat trimmed off specifically because it was intended to run on lower power platforms going forward and in most daily uses has a smaller footprint and better performance compared to 7, and by a reasonable margin. In fact, many hailed it as the saviour of old machines that would otherwise fall into obscurity, although I am sure that its initial stellar results have diminished with subsequent quality of life updates.

Spoiler

Test rig: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015...-make-windows-10-an-easy-upgrade-for-old-pcs/


Test rig 2: https://www.itworld.com/article/296...-8-vs-windows-7-a-performance-comparison.html

That's neither here nor there though, it was merely a good chuckle. He does have a point, 10 was not designed with the NetBurst architecture in mind (he said Prescott, which was incorrect, but I gathered what he was trying to say), so your mileage may vary depending on the workload and the bloat. I'm not one to take people off their chosen path, I can run a benchmark and see the difference myself.

EDIT: I see that you've changed your post to encompass that information as I was typing, which is fair. Most times old machines will run into trouble with hardware accelerated UI elements, but those can be easily (and permanently) disabled, although personally I also trim useless services a particular user is unlikely to need in their use case which boost performance even further.

 

[smf]

Most times old machines will run into trouble with hardware accelerated UI elements, but those can be easily (and permanently) disabled, although personally I also trim useless services a particular user is unlikely to need in their use case which boost performance even further.

The EEE PC struggles to play youtube videos with windows 10, possibly a desktop composition issue. I looked into killing dwm but at the time it looked complicated.

It's always been something I only used for holidays, so sorting it out was never a high priority. But if you have any hints, I might try it out.

 

[blahblah]

Sure. Do you understand that your results vary greatly depending on the platform, especially on a unified kernel? The more platforms you support simultaneously the less specialised the final product is. That's neither here nor there, I chose to stop engaging bleh on the 7 vs. 10 meme because it's a fairly popular myth among power users. Windows 10 had a lot of the fat trimmed off specifically because it was intended to run on lower power platforms going forward and in most daily uses has a smaller footprint and better performance compared to 7, and by a reasonable margin. In fact, many hailed it as the saviour of old machines that would otherwise fall into obscurity, although I am sure that its initial stellar results have diminished with subsequent quality of life updates.

Spoiler

View attachment 156896
View attachment 156897
View attachment 156898
Test rig: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015...-make-windows-10-an-easy-upgrade-for-old-pcs/

View attachment 156899
Test rig 2: https://www.itworld.com/article/296...-8-vs-windows-7-a-performance-comparison.html

That's neither here nor there though, it was merely a good chuckle. He does have a point, 10 was not designed with the NetBurst architecture in mind (he said Prescott, which was incorrect, but I gathered what he was trying to say), so your mileage may vary depending on the workload and the bloat. I'm not one to take people off their chosen path, I can run a benchmark and see the difference myself.

EDIT: I see that you've changed your post to encompass that information as I was typing, which is fair. Most times old machines will run into trouble with hardware accelerated UI elements, but those can be easily (and permanently) disabled, although personally I also trim useless services a particular user is unlikely to need in their use case which boost performance even further.

I wasn't referring to Netburst, I was referring to a specific 'family' of chips. I wanted to be clear that I was referring to the Prescott specifically and not the older Netburst chips.

 

[Foxi4]

The EEE PC struggles to play youtube videos with windows 10, possibly a desktop composition issue. I looked into killing dwm but at the time it looked complicated.

It's always been something I only used for holidays, so sorting it out was never a high priority. But if you have any hints, I might try it out.

I'm not being funny, I've seen Windows 10 run on Pentium II machines with no HW acceleration, so where there's a will, there's a way. Naturally it's hard to advise you without actually seeing the machine in question.

I wasn't referring to Netburst, I was referring to a specific 'family' of chips. I wanted to be clear that I was referring to the Prescott specifically and not the older Netburst chips.

The "Prescott family" consists of Pentium 4 and Celeron D chips. The laptop in question (Latitude D630) is equipped with a Core2Duo T7250 which belongs to the Merom family.

https://ark.intel.com/products/codename/1791/Prescott
https://ark.intel.com/products/codename/2683/Merom

If we're being technical, the chip is neither Prescott (product family) nor NetBurst (microarchitecture), it's a Merom Core 2 chip. I'm not a 100% sure why we're bringing up either since the chip has nothing to do with either of them, I must've misunderstood whatever you were trying to say, and still do.

 

[blahblah]

I'm not being funny, I've seen Windows 10 run on Pentium II machines with no HW acceleration, so where there's a will, there's a way. Naturally it's hard to advise you without actually seeing the machine in question.

The "Prescott family" consists of Pentium 4 and Celeron D chips. The laptop in question (Latitude D630) is equipped with a Core2Duo T7250 which belongs to the Merom family.

https://ark.intel.com/products/codename/1791/Prescott
https://ark.intel.com/products/codename/2683/Merom

If we're being technical, the chip is neither Prescott (product family) nor NetBurst (microarchitecture), it's a Merom Core 2 chip. I'm not a 100% sure why we're bringing up either since the chip has nothing to do with either of them, I must've misunderstood whatever you were trying to say, and still do.

I am not saying that the users laptop contains a Prescott. I was saying that Windows 7 was designed to run well on that family of chips. The users laptop contains a much, much, much more capable chip.

 

[Foxi4]

I am not saying that the users laptop contains a Prescott. I was saying that Windows 7 was designed to run well on that family of chips. The users laptop contains a much, much, much more capable chip.

So I did get you right the first time. Prescott was the tail end of Netburst, there's nothing particularly unique about it besides exceptional performance within that microarchitecture. I've never heard of any particular relation between Vista/7 and Prescott specifically, but I may have missed that, it's all ancient history at this point. I thought you meant all the optimisation that went into running Windows on Netburst which was a completely different kind of architecture with a much longer pipeline than its predecessor, but you maintain that's not the case, so I'm confused. Not that it matters in this thread, I'm just unsure of what you mean in general.

 

[GrailBomb]

If its only seeing 4gb of 8gb ram its because of the 32bit installation (its the max it can use) just install a 64bit version win10, also the program Driver Booster will automatically find, download, and install missing or out of date drivers, easy!

 

[GrailBomb]

Doesn't that require an internet connection?

Yes but windows 10 is fairly decent at installing generic drivers for at the very least an Ethernet connection, if not find those first, and use the software for the rest, or another solution is to purchase a wifi adapter and use the drivers that come with it, there are plenty of ways to work around it, between win 10's generic drivers, and driver booster you shouldn't have any issues getting most PC's up and running.

 

[blahblah]

So I did get you right the first time. Prescott was the tail end of Netburst, there's nothing particularly unique about it besides exceptional performance within that microarchitecture. I've never heard of any particular relation between Vista/7 and Prescott specifically, but I may have missed that, it's all ancient history at this point. I thought you meant all the optimisation that went into running Windows on Netburst which was a completely different kind of architecture with a much longer pipeline than its predecessor, but you maintain that's not the case, so I'm confused. Not that it matters in this thread, I'm just unsure of what you mean in general.

God, why don't you get it?

This really isn't very hard.

I was stating that Windows 7 was designed around the performance profile of Prescott; that it should preform exceptionally on chips that meet/exceed the performance Prescott offers. That's it. Nothing about optimization or NetBurst itself or anything else. I don't mean anything other than the actual information contained in the words I posted. Forget anything you know or think you know, you do not need that in order to gather the meaning of my words. My words stand alone.

The point I was making is that the users laptop far exceeds what Windows 7 requires in order to run well.

--------------------- MERGED ---------------------------

As if I didn't knew XP died. That's sort of the idea here.

Imagine if I'm a PC-collector and I bought a old Windows 2000 PC. I delete the hard drive and start fresh. Do I collect information about the PC to fully restore it, or do I just install a lightweight OS and let it be done with?
Fully restoring is how restoration works.

Computers aren't like old game consoles. There is no harm in restoring an SNES into how it was when it shipped, but if you load an out-of-support operating system onto a computer that is going to touch the internet, you risk harm to both the internet in the form of another infected computer doing god knows what + harm to yourself in the form of said malware screwing around with your machine/your network.

Machines of your laptop's vintage - the kind of hardware you have in that laptop - did not ship to consumers running XP. The only reason that machine shipped on XP is because downgrade rights were used. The period appropriate operating system for a Core 2 machine is Windows 7.

 

[Foxi4]

God, why don't you get it?

This really isn't very hard.

I was stating that Windows 7 was designed around the performance profile of Prescott; that it should preform exceptionally on chips that meet/exceed the performance Prescott offers. That's it. Nothing about optimization or NetBurst itself or anything else. I don't mean anything other than the actual information contained in the words I posted. Forget anything you know or think you know, you do not need that in order to gather the meaning of my words. My words stand alone.

The point I was making is that the users laptop far exceeds what Windows 7 requires in order to run well.

That's not what you said, hence the confusion. What you said was that the OS was built "around the constraints of Prescott". What you're referring to is called a performance envelope. Easy clarification, not sure why you're so frustrated.

 

[blahblah]

That's not what you said, hence the confusion. What you said was that the OS was built "around the constraints of Prescott". What you're referring to is called a performance envelope. Easy clarification, not sure why you're so frustrated.

The constraints being performance. That should be obvious. What other constraints would make sense given the context? Sorry that you are not able to grasp what I am saying. 'Performance envelope' would be a strange choice of words given the context, but I do understand that your knowledge is limited so you get confused when one speaks in a manner that does not align with the specific terminology that you are familiar with. Sorry about that.

 

[blahblah]

By saying "the constraints of Prescott" you're referring to the constraints of a particular implementation of the microarchitecture. A power envelope is the general bracket of computational power expected to be encountered in the time period. You think you're a lot smarter than you really are - I continue to ignore your little quips at me, but I can stop at any time. You phrased your point poorly, you can take the L or you can continue to act smug for no reason, much to my amusement. Either way, I'm done with you purposefully derailing the thread.

Since the thread has gone horribly off-topic, I'm nuking *all* the posts that are not related to *finding drivers for this XP-based machine* and I will continue to do so going forward, this has gone on long enough. If you have no intention of helping the OP do what he intends to do with his machine, you have no business posting here - it's his machine.

No, I'm not. I know what I am referring to. You are guessing, because you are borderline non-technical. I am vastly more knowledgable than you are, and everyone who's been following along can tell. Nothing personal, not really an attack, just stating reality.

The constraints of <particular generation of chip> refers to the performance of that chip. That's absolutely obvious to everyone else. I did not say 'the constraints of NetBurst' as that would indicate what you believe I intended to say. But no, what I actually said is what I say I said.

Nuking posts to try to avoid people noticing you taking that L will not be effective. Everyone saw you getting lapped. Everyone with a technical background was perfectly able to understand what I've said & saw you saying stuff that is outright wrong and likely laughed at you a good bit.

 

[blahblah]

It's ridiculous that this thread was spun off rather than being left where it belonged, but I'm glad it's here rather than being no where at all. The moderator in question (Foxi4) has behaved in the most childish way possible, trying to cover up losing an argument by deleting posts and taking shots at me and deleting my response. Gross stuff, folks.

 

[kuwanger]

Or it could be the XP vs 7 debate was off-topic to the thread. People may desire to have XP on a system "just because". If the machine becomes infected and they do nothing about it, then you can reasonable argue about how unreasonable they're being. That holds true whatever OS you use. Further, I know of no OS that's immune from RCE. You can at best try to take steps that should hypothetically mitigate the risk, but the law of commonality* has shown that the most popular OS is usually the biggest target for real, wide-spread attacks.

The real largest limitation for XP vs 7 for me with the internet would be web browsers not being updated. If one spent the time and effort to backport Chromium and Firefox to XP, you'd probably be at about the same level of protection on that front. If you're behind a router, most direct port attacks can't work without another infected machine on your network. I tend to be paranoid and lazy, so I'd rather avoid using unsupported older versions of Windows on the internet at all; the laziness comes in having to restore after an infection.

* For lack of a better term, the best ROI for any exploit is the one that has the widest reach. Putting the effort in to support XP along with later versions of Windows probably isn't worth the time/energy for a lot of botnet makers, so it's likely happenstance or specific targeting of XP systems (like embedded ones) that heavily effects the probability of being exploited.

 

[Ryccardo]

The real largest limitation for XP vs 7 for me with the internet would be web browsers not being updated. If one spent the time and effort to backport Chromium and Firefox to XP, you'd probably be at about the same level of protection on that front.

You can get Mypal for that - it's a variant of Pale Moon that, contrarily to the original author's claims and attitude, needed just a few changes to still build for XP

The vast majority of malware comes from the entity between chair and mouse making a tool-assisted speedrun out of any installer program; the other majority comes from every single major browser having been intentionally designed and configured, out of the box, to execute without warning code from any remote source

 

[kuwanger]

You can get Mypal for that - it's a variant of Pale Moon that, contrarily to the original author's claims and attitude, needed just a few changes to still build for XP

Thanks for the heads up. Yea, it doesn't surprise me that the amount of effort to support XP is really small. Like exploits, though, the ROI for continue to verify that something keeps working in XP is so low for a lot of developers.

The vast majority of malware comes from the entity between chair and mouse making a tool-assisted speedrun out of any installer program;

Interesting analogy, but I'd also include piracy. Ah, the good old days when official installers didn't include malware, so you could reasonably argue infection was a result of piracy.

the other majority comes from every single major browser having been intentionally designed and configured, out of the box, to execute without warning code from any remote source

So very true. It seems like 90% (or more) of exploits only work with Javascript enabled. So, it's always nice to disable Javascript, block ads, and block a lot of questionable domains. Stuff tends to load faster too, usually.

 

[Alexander1970]

Hello.

First,Windows XP (pro) was and is for me personally Microsofts best shot.

I never had really doubts about securtiy leaks etc. on an unsupported OS.If someone remember on W32.Sasser in 2004 knows what an security leak is.

But to install actual Hardware/use actual programs/software was an adventure with time but not a main reason to change the system.

Sadly,and that was and is the main reason why i´m using Windows 10 now,the Internet support was slowly floating away.I´m using/watching (because of no SAT or Cable TV) the so called MEDIATHEk´s from the diverse privat Channels (SAT 1/Pro 7/Kabel 1/ARTE etc.).My favorite Browser,Firefox,no longer supported Adobe Flash/Shockwave etc. under Windows XP,therefore it´s getting more difficult to use a browser that supports Video streaming,"useful" Downloadmanagers,Plug ins etc.

And another not so important reason was gaming.

I love Windows XP til today but for me it´s no longer useful.Had great 15 Years with it,thank you.

Windows 7 is my second (i only worked about 3 months with it).In my opinion the second great shot - perfect advancement from XP) i think.After my personal end with XP i´ll try it but have also choice to test Windows 10 1507.
And,surprise,W10 worked for me from the first day without any troubles.
BUT Windows 7 for me is a great helper as i´m using it for Video/Soundediting with older Hardware.That means on a second PC it works for me very good and i´m not care about actual internet/security leaks.If someone will watch my VHS edited videos,be my guest.

For that i´m maybe "biased" about any Windows XP and Windows 7 Internet/Security discussions.

 

[Foxi4]

Or it could be the XP vs 7 debate was off-topic to the thread. People may desire to have XP on a system "just because". If the machine becomes infected and they do nothing about it, then you can reasonable argue about how unreasonable they're being. That holds true whatever OS you use. Further, I know of no OS that's immune from RCE. You can at best try to take steps that should hypothetically mitigate the risk, but the law of commonality* has shown that the most popular OS is usually the biggest target for real, wide-spread attacks.

The real largest limitation for XP vs 7 for me with the internet would be web browsers not being updated. If one spent the time and effort to backport Chromium and Firefox to XP, you'd probably be at about the same level of protection on that front. If you're behind a router, most direct port attacks can't work without another infected machine on your network. I tend to be paranoid and lazy, so I'd rather avoid using unsupported older versions of Windows on the internet at all; the laziness comes in having to restore after an infection.

* For lack of a better term, the best ROI for any exploit is the one that has the widest reach. Putting the effort in to support XP along with later versions of Windows probably isn't worth the time/energy for a lot of botnet makers, so it's likely happenstance or specific targeting of XP systems (like embedded ones) that heavily effects the probability of being exploited.

This thread exists exclusively because the moderating team (not myself) has determined that while all of these posts were in fact off-topic, the discussion itself is an interesting one and one that's worth having. I myself share that sentiment, it belongs in its own thread.