Replies

Regarding those who are pinning their hopes on Windows 8.1, I don’t think it’s going to be really viable for much longer in a dynamic environment, long before its official EOL. I say this as someone who is currently running 8.1 Pro on a desktop and laptop as my primary OS and am completely satisfied with it. But:

(1)  Major third-party applications likely will drop support for 8.1 well before its EOL. I think that Google Chrome is a good example of this. I’d posit that it’s more important to have your browser fully-patched and up-to-date than your OS. Chrome supported XP well after its EOL, but when it finally did end support (April 2016), it ended support for Vista at the exact same time–at a time when Vista was still supported by Microsoft. Vista’s market share was so low that Google jumped right from XP being the oldest-supported to 7. And Google’s behavior was the rule, not the exception. Given 8.1’s market share, it seems probable that 8.1 will have support dropped in the same manner as Vista.

(2)  Already, Microsoft is supporting 8.1 in name only. Yes, it’s pushing out the patches. But they’ve already been caught dealing with security vulnerabilities that exist in 7 & 8.1 & 10 and only applying a fix to 10, until they got called out on it. Meanwhile, I have a friend who’s a gamer and got a new Xbox controller and it has drivers only for Windows 10. Microsoft also has permanently stopped approving new Store apps for Windows 8.1 (pre-existing apps can still be updated). Yes, I don’t use the Store either. But my point is that MS is not going to be giving 8.1 any more love than it legally has to between now and 2023 and this will increasingly cause issues in unanticipated ways.

Personally, I’ve installed 10 on partitions which I’m not allowing to connect to the internet, and am taking my time to thoroughly understand, defang and customize it before it will be allowed to connect.

5 users thanked author for this post.

Wheel_D, jburk07, ch100, AlexEiffel

“experience”. “Experience” or “experiences” was used 14 times in that post. A couple of years ago a highly-publicized marketing study reported that millenials preferred spending their money on experiences rather than possessions. By that they meant things like travel, culture, etc. Not operating systems. Someone should tell Microsoft.

2 users thanked author for this post.

Elly, HiFlyer

I can’t promise this trick will work for all, but it did work for me with Outlook 2010 on both Windows 7 and 8.1. It’s simple enought to try and then reverse if you wish. Go to Internet Options via either Control Panel or I.E. In the Advanced tab, scroll down to the Security subsection. One of the options is “Do not save encrypted pages to disk”. If the box is checked, uncheck it, apply, and close out of it. Now see if the problem is fixed. I’d had this problem for quite a while, but after this fix, never again. Not exactly an intuitive place to look, huh!

2 users thanked author for this post.

HiFlyer, Noel Carboni

Thank you for the thorough analysis. And today being November 1, the newest numbers from Netmarketshare are out, and they reinforce your points. Firefox market share declined from the 9.62 % you mention down to 9.25 % for the latest month.

4 users thanked author for this post.

HiFlyer, Ascaris, Elly, SueW

The graph shows the month-to-month fluctuations, and shows accurately that Windows 7 & 10 have nearly identical market share in September. The numbers you’re quoting are for the total time period of the graph. Since the graph covers a time period going all the way back to last October, when Windows 7 had a higher share and Windows 10 a lower share than currently, the numbers show a greater spread than the latest graph data points. If you customize the graph by selecting an identical start date and end date of September 2018, then the numbers change to show 40.88 market share for Win7 & 37.44 for Win10.

It is definitely by my experience tied to being logged in or not. When not logged in, the home page is current, and I see in the “Recent Replies” column on the right that there’s fresh replies I’d like to read. But when I click a link to that post/topic, those replies are not there and I see that the “Recent Replies” column has a totally different (and I can tell  older) set of recent replies, even though they may (falsely) state that they’re from “1 minute ago”. If I go back to the home page so I can see again a recent reply I want to read, and instead click on the link for that User’s home page, and then from there click on his/her replies, the recent reply is not on their Replies page either. Refreshing pages didn’t work, nor doing an ipconfig /flushdns, nothing. Then a light bulb went off when I wondered how these users were able to succeed where I’d failed, and I realized that they must have been logged in to have their replies be associated with their name. So I logged in and everything was current again.

MrBrian,

Here are quotes from Microsoft on the support pages for each of the Windows security updates you recommend be installed rather than the ones originally issued:

“This update does not replace a previously released update.”

“To apply this update, you don’t have to make any changes to the registry.”

Both of these quotes seem inconsistent with the concept that the originals were superceded rather than supplemented. You are far more knowledgeable than I (and possibly Microsoft too!) but I wonder if it’s risky to ignore Microsoft’s descriptions of the updates. I wonder if there would be a downside to installing the original(s) and then the later one(s) you recommend, in sequence??

I have a question that I think may be relevent to others that, like me, want to remain safe but are very skittish about the microcode and windows fixes (or have a more than 5-year old processor), and are very confident that all installed apps are not malicious. It seems that for people in this situation, the entry point for Meltdown and Spectre exploits boils down to the web browser. Everything I’ve read seems to indicate that the way this can happen is through Javascript. So, is a potential way to remain safe while not slowing down your computer simply by disabling Javascript? Or are there other ways outside of Javascript that a browser can be vulnerable? I’m thinking of installing extensions such as ScriptSafe or NoScript; I do understand that there would be a learning curve as I whitelist trusted sites that require JS. But I wouldn’t bother with these extensions if JS is not the only way that Meltdown and Spectre can do harm.

1 user thanked author for this post.

HiFlyer

Both Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 are fully supported on Skylake until at LEAST July 17, 2018 (source: https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/windowsitpro/2016/03/18/updates-to-support-policy-for-skylake-devices-running-windows-7-and-windows-8-1/). That’s a March 2016 blog post from Microsoft. Subsequently, they backtracked further and promised full support until EOL on select devices (source: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/11675/windows-7-windows-8-1-skylake-systems-supported). That second post is from August 2016.