OT: Antivirus and other antimalware stuff

[Bob Neumann]

Ah, a hobbyist! It's nice to have a hobby.

[Tim Streater]

In the context of my Mini I mean.

Really? News to me George. I thought I just had a disk, DVD drive, motherboard, RAM, ports, OS, etc - you know, the usual stuff.

What's so hard about that? I expect next year I'll buy a new barebones Mini, add ram to 8Gig, and shove a solid-state drive in the empty slot as boot device. Doing that will be a little bit fiddly, but teardown info already exists. I'll end up with a fast, responsive, quiet machine that sits on the desk occupying no space (unlike the typical tower PC which is very often largely empty space).

You may perhaps be thinking of some Macs from the 90s that were a bit hard to open up.

[Andy Champ]

Why would you need a contiguous block?

Andy

[The Natural Philosopher]

No idea. All I know is that the program asks for what windows cant deliver, though windows certainly should be able to deliver it, and windows says 'er you had better reboot'

[Mark]

AFAIK There are more Android phones than iOS ones. The tablet market is dominated by Apple but this may change in the near future.

[Mark]

And generally choosing hardware first is the wrong way around. Choose your applications first, then OS and finally the hardware.

But going back to the OP point it would not be good to avoid supporting Windows since this is what the majority of users have.

[dennis]

Windows is just as capable of handling memory as unix. they both use virtual and have 4k pages mapped to disk.

Old versions of windows may have had problems but so did old versions of linux and Macs. windows 7 certainly would allow 3gig if you had an application that could use it.

[tinnews]

This really is no longer true, I find I have as much if not more trouble getting things to work under Windows as under Linux. E.g. my HP printers were much easier to install and get fully working on Linux than on Windows. On the other hand I can't really get my Nokia phone to work as well in Linux as it does in Windows.

[John Williamson]

For what I want to do, which is record high quality sound, the capture hardware is the most critical part of the system, so people recording sound tend to build systems round their favoured hardware. The sound quality is largely unaffected by the applications, though the interface can make a big difference to the ease with which the job can be done, and the OS has to support both.

True. For whatever reason, it *is* the most common desktop OS in its various forms.

[Paul - xxx]

I have a couple of Toshiba laptops, one that I now run W7 on .. it just works .. everything installed and worked after upating all drivers and allowing MS to 'sort it out' using the official Toshiba utilities disk which came originally with W98.

The other identical Toshiba, I tried to install Linux (mandriva then Ubuntu) on it ... Neither would drive the wireless card. Ndiswrapper, in both distros, simply wouldn't find the driver even though I had the utilities disk from Toshiba that it told me had the driver on!

So, we also have two identical Dell laptops, installed W7 64 bit on one and tried Linux as above .. very similar issues, W7 was fine, automatically installing and running 32 bit programs (like memory map) from an automatically installed 32 bit folder and was pretty damn transparent, took less than a day to get a fully installed and stable running system (I'm typing on it now) that again 'just works'

Linux was a mess, again no chance of getting the wireless card running, the ethernet worked OK, but the DVD drive wouldn't, took me 4 days to finally say fergeddit ...

Seems to me that Linux is still the preserve of people who actually like feckin' about with the hard/soft-ware far more than they need the computer to do actual work on.

[Steve Walker]

Usually the "restore" files are on a hidden partition, which is accessed with a specific combination of keypresses during startup.

There's usually a utility included to write them out to DVDs and reclaim the partition for normal use.

SteveW

[The Natural Philosopher]

No, sadly it is not.

No, *nix has always had multiuser and memory management as a core feature.

They might slow to a crawl;, but they don't crash.

so will XP, allegedly, but it doesn't..

[The Natural Philosopher]

I've been paying with JACK. Looks like it works BUT its not playing nice with other Linux sound systems.

[Andy Burns]

You've never encountered the OOMK on Linux then?

[John Rumm]

Quite often because they don't *want* a computer at all, but they do want to run software package "x" and that runs on windows, so that is what they buy. End of selection process.

[John Rumm]

No, but you can get close most of the time. Much depends on how much effort the customer is willing to pay for,

Its both over and under kill... In many cases, a quick sweep with Malware Bytes Anti-Malware will have away most things that the virus scanner has not dealt with.

A reinstall is only of use if you then go on and protect the machine after (common PC world tactic there - reinstall, customer takes it home and 20 mins later is compromised again). A reinstall will not deal with the darkest and most sinister of flash inhabiting rootkit nasties that take hold of the system during boot before windows etc even gets a look in. However these are still thankfully fairly rare in the wild.

[John Rumm]

There is the so called "hackintosh"... now Macs run basically bog standard PC hardware, its far easier than in the past.

[John Rumm]

I was under the impression that Android was exceeding sales of iPhones by quite a margin now? (no so on the iPad though)

Its a hard one to call. Windows will certainly lose some relevance - especially for the class of users that want to run basic comms and "consume" content rather than generate it.

However the desktop "PC" (in its true sense) seems unlikely to vanish - even if you can read your email on a phone, or watch iPlayer on your ethernet TV etc.

Oddly you could include Apple in that categorisation - they saw IBM as the enemy, focussed on them, and got blindsided by MS while doing so. IBM itself became a non entity in the history of the PC fairly quickly. Apple have fared much better the second time around.

That includes IBM - who became yet another PC clone maker in short order (especially after PS/2 and MCA bombed for the very reasons that made the more "open" architecture of the original PC successful). They bailed out of the market completely some time later once it was commoditised.

MS software dominance did not really kick in until windows hit critical mass. Wordpefect, Wordstar, dBase, Lotus 123 etc were all leading industry standard apps that MS initially had no answer to in the DOS environment.

Not while they try to maintain their closed eco-system, walled garden approach. They may be more successful integrating themselves into the distribution of other peoples software though.

I suppose if you include Android as yet another Linux, its the closest its got to crossing into the consumer space. Although as a space it seems that people are still not prepared to pay *much" for the software.

Yu, for the moment, but Macs are starting to gain action in that area.

As the various own2own competitions have demonstrated, the Apple kit is frequently the first to fall when people target the effort at it (quite possibly because you get to win what you hack and more hackers want the pricey apple laptop!)

The fundamental differences in security between platforms is nothing like as wide as it was - nut it stands to reason if you have 1000 times more effort being directed at breaking one architecture than another, cracks are going to show in the popular target first.

Yup. There is nothing particularly new about people scamming others. The internet is just another vector.

Or by weight of numbers, more often windows PC users.

Much as in the same way it used to be easy to steal a car without access to the original key. Now technologically it is far far harder, the bad guys have simply changed target, and steal the keys, or "encourage" the owner/driver to hand them over. The worry about the latter approach (when applied to PC and network security) is that many of the newer techniques are platform independent.

[dennis]

He probably doesn't know how many different MMUs there were on unix systems in the early days either. And of course unix crashes.

[John Rumm]

Sounds like Win 8 will run on Arm as well now...