My gift to those of you still running Win-XP: The ability to get Microsoft updates for 5 more years

[HomeGuy]

Oh you poor little lost souls.

If you had done it today (and selected "Custom" instead of "Express" installation), this is what you'd see:

3 Critical updates:

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Security Update for Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 SP2 on Windows Server

2003 KB2932079 - MS14-026 Download size: 1.1 MB , less than 1 minute

A security issue has been identified in a Microsoft software product that could affect your system. You can help protect your system by installing this update from Microsoft. For a complete listing of the issues that are included in this update, see the associated Microsoft Knowledge Base article. After you install this update, you may have to restart your system. Details...

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Security Update for WEPOS and POSReady 2009 KB2926765 - MS14-027

Typical download size: 275 KB , less than 1 minute

A security issue has been identified in a Microsoft software product that could affect your system. You can help protect your system by installing this update from Microsoft. For a complete listing of the issues that are included in this update, see the associated Microsoft Knowledge Base article. After you install this update, you may have to restart your system. Details...

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Security Update for Internet Explorer 8 for WEPOS and POSReady 2009 KB2953522 - MS14-029 AKA Security update for Internet Explorer versions 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and

11: May 13, 2014 Download size: 3.2 MB , less than 1 minute

A security issue has been identified in a Microsoft software product that could affect your system. You can help protect your system by installing this update from Microsoft. For a complete listing of the issues that are included in this update, see the associated Microsoft Knowledge Base article. After you install this update, you may have to restart your system. Details...

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Now you go ahead and read those microsoft links. And if you really want to be so frighted about the state of your XP system less than a month after "official" end-of-support, you'll read these:

As you read them and notice the MS14-what-ever numbers they mention, go and glance at what updates you could be installing right now if you follow my instructions. Those are the same updates being offered to Win-7 and various other platforms - but not for XP.

Yes, I updated an XP-SP3 system with those 3 critical updates.

And then I selected a bunch of suggested updates (there were about a dozen of them). One of those was a root certificate update (dated Nov

2013) that for some reason Micro$haft wasn't offering to me before.

One day, maybe soon, you'll realize that yes, POSReady 2009 is XP-SP3 with a different license agreement, and you'll be dying to get those updates on your systems. So you can thank me now, or thank me later.

And no, Micro$haft will do nothing to prohibit this in the future. The millions of various POS systems around the world are too important to f*ck with by trying to make some change that will prevent this hack from working on "real" XP systems.

Mark my words. Hear me now and believe me later.

In the mean time you can all shout "We're not worthy!".

[devnull]

Or you could buy a $99 computer with Windows 7 from Walmart and not worry about your silly XP hacks.

[Shadow]

If you foot the plane-ticket, I agree. Then I can enjoy the latest unpatched "zero-day" vulnerabilities.

[]'s

[Dave]

Hey dude! I just effected the change in my registry, and rebooted to log onto the MS Update website. I selected "Express" thinking that these updates should meet the criteria, and low and behold, I got all three! Took about 5 minutes (maybe) and I'm rockin and rolling. Now I did a system backup beforehand, just in case, and will be sure and post if I start having goofy problems. But being somewhat familiar with Point Of Sale devices, as a service tech, I don't expect anything of that nature. In my experience they are desktop compuers, just like any other, only with a limited repetoire of software to run. But they have the exact same security needs as any other computer, which is what they are constantly downloading asnd updating. Soooo, I expect this should work just fine, and wish to express my gratitude for this true gift. Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU.

Take it easy...

Dave

[Pico Rico]

back in the day when windows was just a user interface, the first thing I would do to a new computer is rip out (or fully disable) windows, and just let the DOS programs rip. People were amazed at how fast my computer was.

[Mark Lloyd]

[snip]

I seem to remember something about the real purpose of Windows being to slow your PC down so you need a new one.

[Moe DeLoughan]

Microsoft warns against registry hack that allows Windows XP updates

Yesterday news came out that a registry hack would allow Windows XP users to still receive critical security updates, despite the OS being no longer supported. Now Microsoft is publicly warning folks against using this method to update their machines.

The registry hack would allow XP users to mask the fact their machines were using an unsupported OS. Microsoft?s update servers would register the machines as using Windows Embedded POS Ready 2009, a version supported until 2019. Users would then be able to download certain updates; however it's not clear which updates would actually work or fix anything as the operating systems differ from one another.

On this note Microsoft has released a statement to ZDnet warning users to not use this hack. The company says this will likely do more harm than good.

"The security updates that could be installed are intended for Windows Embedded and Windows Server 2003 customers and do not fully protect Windows XP customers. Windows XP customers also run a significant risk of functionality issues with their machines if they install these updates, as they are not tested against Windows XP."

It's pretty obvious why Microsoft released this statement. After all, it's not like they'd urge users to go on hacking their machines and misleading the company's update servers. Then again, they do have a point in that these updates aren't tested against XP which can create problems, and may not even offer any protection to those systems that employ it.

[philoÂÂ]

I have a friend who still uses XP for his business and though he could afford to upgrade to a new machine, he will be retiring in a few months so wanted to see if he could get by using XP.

Over the past few months he's seemed to have accumulated considerably more malware than usual so I had him bring the machine to my shop for a thorough clean up. He agreed to take part in an experiment and I applied the registry hack. I will keep an eye on the machine until he retires and if there are any problems I'll report back.

BTW: He also has a laptop he can use if his main machine goes down so he will not be in much trouble if the experiment fails.

His main machine had been inoperative for two weeks anyway as I was on vacation and did not have time to get to it until I got back.

[CRNG]

On Wed, 28 May 2014 06:35:36 -0500, philo  wrote in

Thanks!

[philoÂÂ]

Three days with no problems at all...so far so good.

[nestork]

Dave:

2 K worth of memory on the Voyager missions? That's amazing. Do you know when they were launched?

We're very much living in an age of change. Years ago I wondered what people would do with home computers... other than their income tax returns. They very much seemed to be an answer looking for a question.

Now, the way things seem to be going is that computers are becoming specialized to each task. You have a computer inside your car that monitors your engine and maximizes both power and fuel economy, and when it detects an impact does a whole bunch of calculations based on the speed of the car and the weight of the driver and passenger, and decides which, if any, airbags to deploy; all in 20 to 40 milliseconds. There are computers in the cash registers at every supermarket that do nothing but read UPC codes all day long and spit out the price for each UPC code. I once wondered what people would do with their own home computers, and now I'm finding out that instead of us using computers, it's us using everything we have, and everything we have has a small computer inside it. Even our frost free refrigerators have computers that decide when to defrost the fridge evaporator coils based on the humidity and how long the fridge door has been open.

[philoÂÂ]

caused a problem

will start a new thread