It's clear you are not able to take apart a deficiency of a crappy Intel VGA from a supposed deficiency of a SW running on top of them. Obviously if you want to watch a hd video on a not adequate HW w/o HW decoding the CPU needs to do all of the work. But the point is that watching the same video on the same HW using the html5 standard we use today is way more taxing than using flash. In the transition era was plenty of tricks and extensions to force flash over html5 just to keep youtube usable. That's surprising, that you forgot them (or you didn't know). Try to look at the moon not the finger pointing it, instead of parroting the same useless and wrong rants. Flash had it's share of problems, most of them were security problems given it was created in an era when online security was not a thing, and Adobe preferred to throw away the whole thing just because the html5 work was mostly done by other companies, while maintaining flash was all internal work . That was the problem of flash not the CPU usage.
I stopped using antivirus somewhere around Win98/XP. However I still used virus scanners on BartPE and later on WinPE to service computers of my customers. Today I only use VirusTotal occasionally. According to me, it is impossible to build really secure system based on antivirus. No matter how good it is, it is never 100% perfect. And less than 100% blocking effect is unacceptable to me. So I use better methods that never failed me.
On the topic of АV - I've been rawdogging the interwebs on Windows 7 with the ESU updates for the past year or so and it was quite liberating not having to exclude my warez in Windows 10's Defender. However I had to think of something when downgrading my grandpa's aging laptop with a 5400RPM hard drive back to Win7. SiMPLiX has a small program called SmartMon that works similar to an AV. It hashes every proccess and executable and compares that to Virus Total. It's super neat, doesn't even have a GUI or start random checks that hammer your HDD in the middle of the night. Setting it up was a bit tricky but it definitely gives me a peace of mind that my grandpa won't claim one of these free iPhones (if something were to slip through uBlock Origin) On another note - Chromium v110 no longer working with Win7 might be a huge problem since a large part of modern apps are just a Chromium reskin of some sort. Discord immediately comes to mind and I wonder if newer versions would also drop support for Win7 since v110 can't run on it. Personally with the V3 manifest thingy and now Chromium I think it might finally be time for me to move to Firefox. While Waterfox and Librewolf seem like an improvement over stock FF (in terms of privacy they definitely are) I would much rather use an ESR (Extended Security Release) build of Firefox. Thing is I no longer get excited by fancy new features and just want stuff to work (sounding like a boomer lol ). Being a few versions behind while still getting the security benefits is all I am after.
I think that Chromium EOL is the biggest issue for Windows 7/8.1. It is not just about browser, it is about engine. Many apps use Microsoft WebView2, CEF, Electron or otherwise chromium engine internally. When it is EOLed those apps will stop working, when their current versions become deprecated. It is all about software, not about security. Security issues can almost always be resolved some way, but not the lack of software. I use Debian Linux (desktop and server) for years and I like it. But (desktop) software availability is nowhere near to that of Windows.
I agree that chrome deprecating windows 7 is a huge deal. I know that versions of the brave browser still work on windows 7 up version 1.47.171 but it's because it's also based on chrome that it'll probably not work after that.
Abbodi, any reason you stuck with a 2020-07 version of Slimjet, or did you just not bother to update it after that? I was going to try that browser again but wasn't sure if you were avoiding newer versions for a reason (on Win7). Thanks!
Yeah didn't bother, it just work only very few websites behave strangely, i just use portable FireFox 96.0.1 when needed
Hi, Many here probably already know about WindowsXLite.com I'm dual booting with W7, at least to have something already working in case on sudden needing like Gob/Work apps not running on 7. These XLite are very good, even on old machines. Just happened I've got more Ram and a SSD and it's like to have a totally new computer. Even when tested on my set up was running fine too HDD and 6Gb DDR3 The needed time to make everything work as smooth as in 7 is worth on those Mod Builds.
How about security ? It may be secure to use outdated browser/engine on known and trusted web sites. But what about arbitrary, unknown, dark sites of the Internet?
It has some advantages: - native Microsoft Basic Display Driver (so UEFI Class 3 works out of the box), - native Microsoft NVMe driver, - native Microsoft USB3 driver. However above drivers (except BasicDisplay) have been backported to Win7, so these differences have diminished. Considering that, Windows 8.1 is not so much different from Windows 7 in real life.
An OS is not just the GUI, Win 8.1 is immensely improved over Win7 under the hood. Just to mention a few things. Hyper-V support. (but unlike W10 it can still run VirtualPC) Way faster boot time VHDX support (way more robust and practical than VHDs). Boot from native VHD AND VHDX on all SKUs, not just Enterprise and Ultimate Vastly improved DHCP client (almost instantaneous connection to WIFI networks over 30/40 seconds needed by Win7 A way cleaner GUI (that lacks a decent start menu, a problem that needs just few mouse click needed to install Classic Shell, (which is way better than Win7 start menu). A fully updated Win7 takes something like 20GB of HDD space. A fully updated Win8.1 takes 4/5 GB less thanks to the resetbase feature that cleans the ever growing component store. Win8.1 has the deduplication support, which is likely the best thing MS did in 30 years. Win8.1 can boot not just from real partitions but also from WIMs, and can be LZX compressed which means that a full installation can take less than 4GB In 32bit and less than 7GB in AMD64 flavors. I can continue for two pages if you want.
But many independent software vendors EOLed Windows 7 and 8.1 in the same time. No matter how these OSes differ under the hood. Same situation like with XP and Vista. Chrome for example, EOLed support for these OSes in the same day.