Windows 10 updating

[Bill]

In message , T i m writes

I find that interesting because I ran Windows Home Server as a backup server here on the suggestion of my son. He then had a disk crash on his system and had a major job recovering the data in readable format (don't know any details beyond that). Soon after that I had a problem and decided to retreat by installing CentOS and backing up to it in formats that I knew I could read on any machine here. Suggestions from Mike Tomlinson here, and a friend in the USA were really helpful in getting it going. Then the power supply on my HP server died and while I was doing the metal bodging to get a standard psu to fit, I decided I'd better have a second backup server, so put one together and discovered that Centos7 was very different from Centos6. I had to be helped again.

I just don't know about any of this these days.

CentOS 6 has been reliable, CentOS 7 less so, but maybe that's because I haven't bothered to understand the differences. The problem remains that there are Windows programs that don't have equivalents in Linux and, for example, audio still seems to be a mishmash of mediocre programs even when compared with ancient Windows audio (which itself isn't that brilliant). (Maybe it's time to give Harrison Mixbus another go).

On the other hand it just isn't acceptable to have Wndows7 programs switching from "Don't update" to "Automatic" or W10 pushing in different drivers under the radar. I caught it breaking my touchscreen drivers because it was an obvious thing to have stopped working, but how do I know what other obscure drivers might have changed without being discovered until some critical moment.

The W7 rolled up drivers seem to still come with some hints about what is being addressed, but W10's updates as far as I can see are still done blind.

End of rant. Sorry.

[T i m]

I have read of that but it's not what I have observed so far myself.

Ok.

I'm nearly in the same position as I built my V1 WHS 2069 days ago and because I haven't really touched it since, have forgotten what I did to build (install) it. And I use it every day (fileserver) and it backs up all the PC's here every day and only draws about 40W and shuts down when not in use ... ;-)

Quite. A mate is still using Cardfile (from W3.1) every day for his customer database because it still works (on W7). ;-)

Again, I'm guessing not because you *want to* exactly?

Whilst as a fellow admin-user I understand and agree with you ... as a user admin (ex professional, currently friends and family) I know they simply won't do any of them if they aren't done for them. This is generally only obvious on the odd Linux system I am party to (where the updates have never been done since the last time I was there). ;-(

Pass, I've never looked or been interested to look TBH (in nearly 40 years supporting Windows). OOI I've just (tonight) installed W10 as a fresh install (using a W7 COA) and it went straight on. Mint 18 needed to be handheld to deal with the Broadcom WiFi drivers (and luckily I stumbled on a web page that actually helped).

Just as 99.99% of the userbase want them. ;-)

Thanks for sharing with the group. ;-)

Cheers, T i m

[Johnny B Good]

That much was obvious with the advent of winXP (but at least you still had some control over its behaviour without having to jump through *too* many hoops).

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , Dan S. MacAbre escribió:

Mint is released in three versions. The most commonly used one has the Cinnamon desktop, which is heavily reliant on the video card will run like treacle on that one.

The MATE version is much less graphics-intensive and will likely run fine.

I installed Mint MATE on an older HP Microserver (1.3GHz AMD Neo cpu,

4GB ram, basic ATi onboard video) and it was perfectly usable. Using a cheapy 27 quid 128GB SSD from fleabay made a big difference.

[Handsome Jack]

What was the danger with XP? (which I still use, though with updates turned off, not that there are any now).

[dennis]

Well it fine to fix a bug and then leave a machine running for months before it actually gets loaded into memory. It must be as linux does that. I would be surprised if it even tells the user it needs to be rebooted as it expects the users to know these things.

You would have thought that with it being open source and having all those people examining the code the bug would have been found and fixed again within hours not years. Just who reviews the changes made to the code and why didn't they spot that it had been cocked up? I expect there are more hackers reviewing the code than developers as there is a financial incentive for the hacker to find an exploit.

[tim...]

Win 7 gives me the option that I want ('Check for updates but let me choose whether to download and install them')

Win 10 gives me no options - it only allows auto update. All you can do to avoid that is tell it that your connection is metered, but you have to remember to do that every time you connect to something new. Otherwise that will start the auto update process, which, as I already said will install everything, not just the ones that you choose. Thus there is no possibly to have the ones that you "want" and not the rest.

tim

[Adrian Caspersz]

Great website on currently open vulnerability if you want some point scoring fodder.

You would have thought that Microsoft being a company trusted with the computing activities of so many users worldwide, would not do exactly the stupid greedy and senseless things that make users so desire to actually turn OFF their patch update service?

IMO, It's nuts :(

[dennis]

I don't need any points thanks. I just don't like the way some idiots go around telling the uninformed that their preferred OS is more secure than whatever the others are using. All OSes need looking after and some need more knowledge than the average user has to look after them.

Well you only have to look at the big drop in vulnerabilities since windows 10 went live to know who the nuts are and wonder why they really don't want to upgrade from XP/win7 (XP I can understand as it cost money).

AFAICS debian had more vulnerabilities since windows 10 went live than windows 10 did.

[Johnny B Good]

The short answer to that is because they can. MSFT have got their customers right where they want them. No more pussyfooting about. They've removed the soft options effectively placing their customers between a rock and a hard place.

As far as MSFT are concerned, their customers will either have to like it and lump it or go elsewhere knowing full well that, for 99% or more of their precious customer base, there *is* no "Elsewhere" for them to go to.

[The Natural Philosopher]

In this sample, I think out of maybe 50 regulars, we have 2-3 linux users.

I think its a fork in the road. There are going to be corporate customers and there are going to be home users. The latter will go for the slabs and bling and trust themselves to the MS cloud, but corporate users want solid stable desktop workstations, and they aren't getting that from MS. And they can buy linux support from Red hat. And IBM.

At some stage major apps like photoshop will get ported.

And then its a whole new ballgame

[T i m]

Yes, just like the supplier of any other appliance ... ?

But if you ask (/most) customers what they think about it all, they will just shrug as they won't have a clue what you are going on about. ;-(

I'm pretty sure they have done no such thing for 99% of their customers who really cgaf about the things a few tekkies feel

*important*. And I mean *really* couldn't, even when you point stuff out to them.

So, do you think they would really gamble their customer base in such a way? Look what happened with W8. How long was it before they released 8.1 'fixing' many of the things that still worked (as such) but people said they simply didn't like?

Look how much W10 has gone back to W7, from a basic users POV I mean.

*If* Windows 10 was so bad (as a user tool) then I'm guessing more people would migrate to Apple (and billions of people now have iPhones and iPads etc) but they don't seem to be doing so:

I think what we are seeing here is a tiny proportion of a tiny proportion of people who think a commercial organisation isn't simply out to earn as much money as possible and that most consumers of such output actually care past what said solution does for them?

And as far as renting an OS .. most people already rent (/ PAYG) their Sky TV, Netflix, their home and mobile telephone service, their car, their holiday home, their house and many many other tings so why do you think *they* (eg, not *us*) would really care?

But you are right, whilst I've spent very little with MS over the years, given the choice of renting an OS that does do everything I need versus going without with an OS that's free but doesn't do everything I need, I know what I would do, on at least one machine. ;-)

Cheers, T i m

[Bill]

In message , T i m writes

Stick with the pre-rental version of the OS? As have all of the Adobe users that I know.

[Vir Campestris]

Maybe more. I use both.

This box is Win7; my laptop is Win10; my main dev box is Ubuntu.

That CVE list shows Linux as having something like a third of the problems of Windows over the last 5 years.

Which says to me you need to be careful whatever you're using. Windows is worse, but not _lots_ worse - and some of that difference may be down to the number of users being a bigger attack surface.

Andy

[charles]

and I'm writing this using RISC OS (5.23)

[The Natural Philosopher]

All I know is that I got 2-3 viruses on windows and have never had malware on this linux system or any linux system

I used to reboot several times a day, now its several times a month

[dennis]

I have never had a virus on windows since 3.0. AFAIK I don't have any malware on my linux boxes either but its hard to be certain.

That's about the same as this windows laptop and its not usually because it needs rebooting but because I am taking it somewhere and I don't want to leave it suspended so I turn it off. It only takes about 35 seconds to start up so its no hassle.

My linux server machines were both rebooted last week after they installed some updates. Linux does need to reboot after some updates despite what TNP claims.

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , charles escribió:

Cue Wodney to tell us there's no such thing.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

And no problems with constant updates there. ;-) Or worries about a virus, etc.

[Vir Campestris]

I had to reboot my godarnn Linux box about 10 times yesterday trying to get something to work. Supposedly you can just restart networkmanager. In practice it doesn't come up quite the same as it does after a reboot :(

Andy