Windows 7

[stevem]

Even with injection/deauthentication/rainbow/pre-computed hash tables, WPA-CCMP PSK with decent 63 char key is resistant to dictionary attack, so is more than fine for home use. GPU/cloud based attacks are unwieldy with too little payback. Enterprise solutions for home are likely overkill. A quick scan shows ~30% WEP, ~60% WPA-PSK, ~10% WPA2-CCMP in the neighborhood. Most 802.11n devices are operating at 2.4GHz with WPA-PSK...

I had an interesting case of a GTX 280 failing in an amusing manner which lead to triggering of non-genuine & reactivation required warnings in Win7. On boot, 16x GTX 280s were detected & drivers auto-installed. A few hours later the system refused to POST with the card installed. I didn't think to take a screen grab of device manager & control panels of 16-way SLI action.

There's still stuff that p1sses me off about Win7 explorer, though...

 

[Silent_Buddha]

There's still stuff that p1sses me off about Win7 explorer, though...

Yup, Win7 explorer still pisses me off every single day. It's absolutely retarded that they removed column headers (for easy sorting) in all views other than details. Not to mention the myriad of other things that were added, or the limited customizability of the navigation pane.

Having to right click - sort by - <choice>...then immediately have to AGAIN right click - sort by - descendng (if I don't want ascending). And then having to repeat that tedious @#$%ing process every time I need to resort. It's absolutely mind bogglingly infuriating. Yes, I could go to to details view, but if I'm working on a lot of images, losing thumbnail view is no better.

/blearg

Regards,
SB

 

[N00b]

Even with injection/deauthentication/rainbow/pre-computed hash tables, WPA-CCMP PSK with decent 63 char key is resistant to dictionary attack, so is more than fine for home use. GPU/cloud based attacks are unwieldy with too little payback. Enterprise solutions for home are likely overkill. A quick scan shows ~30% WEP, ~60% WPA-PSK, ~10% WPA2-CCMP in the neighborhood. Most 802.11n devices are operating at 2.4GHz with WPA-PSK...

While WPA2-CCMP with random 63 char key surely is safe right now, I think most people do have a much, much shorter key. Also if a hole in WP2-CCMP should be found one day, will people remember to enable to their firewall? I doubt that. The thing is there is really no good reason to turn the windows firewall off most of the time.

 

[Frank]

Security isn't everything, things have to work first and foremost. And most people at home don't have an IT department that takes care of things.

Yes, security is important, but we've gotten more security that broke things than solutions and/or improvements in the last five years or so.



And I totally agree with all the people who feel that the UI is very shiny, looks even better, is very cool and overall better than Vista, but is very irritating and dumbed down compared to XP. Like, most games over the last few years.

Really, no persistent/global (view) settings in explorer, refresh/reorder or not showing new files, and not even the option to be a real administrator, unless you jump through many hoops?

And it was about time that the OS _FINALLY_ used free memory to speed things up, had a scheduler that actually works, for the most part, and handles I/O requests threaded and distributed. Compared to just about all of the competing OS'es, who've done that for about a decade or longer.


Then again, it's what you need if you need to use Microsoft Office and want to play games.


And for something completely different: I really love it, that I can now open OpenOffice documents in Microsoft Office without a glitch. They got that right!

 

[Blazkowicz]

At least on Win7 there's absolutely no reason to turn it off (yes, I know many who don't have NATting routers)

Amazingly my router/DSL box (provided by and belonging to ISP) was configured as non-NAT but I quickly changed it to NAT (a checkbox actually called "enable router" in the web interface)

Someone running such a setting (a weird one, as it wasn't PPPoE but some bridge which gave the public IP to your network card!) would leave the windows firewall enabled anyway. that would be non-technical person leaving stuff on defaults.

As long as my router does NAT I'm fine. Then I don't run a firewall on my computer. I'm not really worried about computers from my home network, I thought the router was my line of defense against the wild internet already ; if I were concerned I wouldn't put much faith in a software firewall afterall.

I never want to deal with settings and nags for any local gaming, file sharing or connection on the home network

 

[Blazkowicz]

I've found quite a funny screenshot :

awesome. it looks less messy than a desktop I have with GTK applications, a KDE application and a motif application. because the colors and fonts aren't wrong. Interface conventions are all different though, unlike my unix programs

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Seeing that reminds me of one of the things I like about Win7. Calculator was upgraded to serve as a proper scientific calculator... Now if only it could do graphing also. Would have been nice if I'd had something like that when I was in college.

Regards,
SB

 

[hoom]

Calculator has unit converters now too
Stupidly it doesn't store your last used one & always resets to Angle...

As well as the aforementioned compatibility patch they slipped in a fix for various activation hacks/work-arounds that was not enabled by default, have to click on it so MS can safely say that it was opt-in.

Bunch of people at work didn't have legit copies & obviously didn't bother to read the description of the update because they were complaining about having 'Your copy of Windows is not legitimate' on their desktop the next day

 

[Davros]

I tried to use paint on win7
cant find the file-edit-view menu

 

[BRiT]

Hit the ALT key.

 

[aaronspink]

Just took a quick look at that site.

Ugh, didn't know disabling UAC also disables protected mode in IE. Not that I do that, but know some people that use IE and disable UAC.

Regards,
SB

Why EVER use IE?

 

[Kaotik]

Why EVER use IE?

Why not? It's GUI is IMO a lot nicer than others (even though you can skin/them FF etc to look near the same, it's still not on the same level of OS integration looks), and features are more than enough (no, I don't like mouse gestures, yes, I do use adblock, but there's adblock pro for IE, too)

 

[aaronspink]

Why not? It's GUI is IMO a lot nicer than others (even though you can skin/them FF etc to look near the same, it's still not on the same level of OS integration looks), and features are more than enough (no, I don't like mouse gestures, yes, I do use adblock, but there's adblock pro for IE, too)

NoScript
Flashblock
Scriptmonkey

 

[Kaotik]

NoScript
Flashblock
Scriptmonkey

Brains have kept me clean so far

 

[Silent_Buddha]

NoScript
Flashblock
Scriptmonkey

Easy enough to toggle Flash on and off in IE, so that's not a problem. Script blocking is more of a PITA, but I'm not as worried about scripting alone as I am about scripting + Flash.

And 3rd party browsers don't give me any substantial advantages to offset having to worry about tracking bug fixes, etc seperately from the omnipresent Windows Update.

IE does everything I need and more. I'd list advantages and disadvantages versus FF, but since I stopped bothering to track changes to FF about 2 years ago, I'm sure I'd be seriously out of date.

Being able to instantly turn off and on any IE addon is good enough for the majority of my concerns. Ability to instantly spawn a private (nothing saved to HD included changes to history, etc.) browsing session fills the rest of my privacy/security concerns. As well as other security implementations to browsing.

Its ability to handle up to 20+ windows with 20+ tabs open in each is generally more than enough to handle my sometimes heavy browsing needs.

Really at this point I just don't see a need for another browser. Just like I don't generally see a need to replace whatever UI comes with my monitor/TV/DVR/whatever. That's what a browser is to me now. I'll use whatever the machine has on it and couldn't be arsed to use anything else.

In the past I've used Netscape (up to 2001), then various combinations of IE, FF, and Opera. When IE 7 launched it was good enough that I just had it with constantly updating FF (good riddance), and never did like Opera.

In other words, a browser for me is like a Microwave oven. As long as it works and does what I want (browsing) well, then it doesn't matter what brand it is.

Regards,
SB

 

[N00b]

Ability to instantly spawn a private (nothing saved to HD included changes to history, etc.) browsing session fills the rest of my privacy/security concerns. As well as other security implementations to browsing.

Quick note here: When using IE's InPrivate feature Flash still saves data to disk (in %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Macromedia\Flash Player). So if you are really concerned about privacy you should turn flash off for you InPrivate sessions or wait for the next flash version (10.1), which is supposed to honor privacy settings in IE and FF.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Yup Flash is always off unless I need it for something. That's a given. But did not know that it was saving even in a private browsing session, good info to know.

Regards,
SB

 

[Npl]

Windows 7 annoys me more and more
* Why are copy-operation normal "explorer-windows"? If you have a big file operation running and a couple explorer windows open (which I sometimes do if I rearrange stuff between HDDs) you better dont do a "close all" on the explorer group. your transfer(s) will stop aswell without question or warning.
* How often does this damn system scan every file involved before file operations, on USB Sticks the scanning often takes longer than the operation itself (like removing files). And after scanning every file its still not smart enough to warn about issues (not enough space, etc) before - which makes the scan useless.
* What the heck is happening when the explorer bar gradually fills with green? until then doing stuff like making a new folder wont take effect until the bar is fully green... at which point you typically get a dozen new folders if you are impatient like me. And nice that you can stop the "greening", but it will immediately start again. Ugh.
* Speed - Have 1 transfer active? Everything else will come to a crawl, even if its a 10MB/s transfer to a USB-Stick. XP did a way better job of not slowing noticeable down until you really tried exactly that.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

* How often does this damn system scan every file involved before file operations, on USB Sticks the scanning often takes longer than the operation itself (like removing files). And after scanning every file its still not smart enough to warn about issues (not enough space, etc) before - which makes the scan useless.
* What the heck is happening when the explorer bar gradually fills with green? until then doing stuff like making a new folder wont take effect until the bar is fully green... at which point you typically get a dozen new folders if you are impatient like me. And nice that you can stop the "greening", but it will immediately start again. Ugh.
* Speed - Have 1 transfer active? Everything else will come to a crawl, even if its a 10MB/s transfer to a USB-Stick. XP did a way better job of not slowing noticeable down until you really tried exactly that.

First 2 points I'm quoting are related I believe. The green bar in Explorer is windows scanning the file properties of every file in the folder. This can take particularly long if you have a lot of media files as it's getting info on things such as resolution, runtime, etc. If this folder is included in windows Indexing, then it'll happen virtually instantly (as all that information will be stored).

For the USB, it has to do this everytime regardless as you can't index external storage devices.

I'm pretty sure you can turn off this feature, but I'm not certain on that as I haven't seen a need to do so.

For the last point, I haven't noticed that myself. Even having multiple (3-4 transfers, local and network) doesn't slow my system down in any way. Then again I have 8 GB of memory, so all transfers are generally sufficiently cached during transfers. Only thing that slows things down is if my MLC SSD with Samsung controller decides to start stuttering (rarely).

Regards,
SB

 

[Davros]

* What the heck is happening when the explorer bar gradually fills with green? until then doing stuff like making a new folder wont take effect until the bar is fully green... at which point you typically get a dozen new folders if you are impatient like me. And nice that you can stop the "greening", but it will immediately start again. Ugh.

My god I hate that with a passion.
I think its doing something stupid like scanning the folder. ooh this folder has 43 mp3 files, 27 jpegs and 55 word documents therfore its best if i display the folder icon with little thumbnails of all filetypes contained within.
like this