Windows 10 bricks

Win10 x86, can't "upgrade over top" since there is no Win11 x86. Win11 is only x64 version. You can do a Clean Install of Win11, to install the x64 version. You can install it "beside" the copy of Win10.

Win10 1GB RAM Win11 4GB RAM (2.6GB given over to sandbox OS image in RAM) Win11 16GB RAM (in addition to the previous, 8GB RAM given over to AI with NPU present)

Win10 legacy boot, might not work. Do a "Full" backup of the hard drive, and try "mbr2gpt.exe" to change the drive over to GPT partitioning. But if the machine does not have UEFI boot ("your mouse works" in the BIOS, if the BIOS is UEFI), and Win11 really wants to attempt Secure Boot, which is supported by a UEFI BIOS.

In Win10 Settings panel, type "TPM" to get to the Security Processor page. That will have the details of your TPM. The TPM could be

While this machine doesn't support every nuance of W11, it's running W11 anyway.

KNOPPIX_V9.1DVD-2021-01-25-EN.iso

On a Knoppix release by Klaus Knopper, there is an early release that might get stuffed in a magazine insert, then there might have been a later release where peasants can download the ISO (that's me). Thus, while the date in the string is generally indicative, it might not be the very last one. But that date should be close enough for most purposes.

Paul

It was engineered for use.

For example, it used to mount partitions RO, for forensic reasons, then you could issue a remount and change the partition to RW if you wanted to write. Whereas a lot of current-generation setups mount everything RW, even if that wasn't quite what you had in mind.

The boot line is up-front. No edit grub submenu. The "boot line", you type in the things you want to launch it.

knoppix # load 32 bit version knoppix64 noacpi # load 64 bit version, run APM mode

There is a "cheat codes" page under an F key, with more of those options. Like F2 or F3 maybe.

Klaus also played a part in squashFS, but I don't know the whole story there.

Klaus played a declining role, in the later releases, and there was a team of volunteers who were doing the heavy lifting. He still oversaw the project, but wasn't working in the pits, because he had a real job.

I believe at first, he was doing the whole thing, himself.

Paul

So has Klaus Knopper paused all further development of Knoppix? The fact that the ISO dates from 2021 worries me slightly when used on a machine connected to the internet...... security vulns galore?

It looks that way, presumably his interests have changed. His website is that of a consulting engineer, and contains a few other projects.

Of course. I would hate to try to work out how many upgrades to sid there has been in that time, although of course not many will be security related.

It's a diagnostic tool, and I would expect it to be run on a machine with no network connection. It contains general computing applications, but it isn't something you'd expect to use for casual email or surfing.

If it can see the local SSID, then it's safe to say the wifi works, and you can see what driver software is installed to make that happen. Any other networking issues can normally be dealt with by any up-to-date live distribution, such as Debian's own.

Being elderly, like many here I suspect, but unlike many here, I'm not the least bit computer savvy, (don't even understand the terms being bandied about), I've been using Win10 successfully for a good few years (upgraded from WinXP IIRC), I am rather worried that MS is no longer going to support it.

But bearing in mind Win10 has been running for several years, I would have thought the worst bugs would have been fixed by now. So is there any real disadvantage in the likes of me continuing to use it unsupported, especially if I have a reasonably good anti-virus programme running (Malwarebytes, regularly updated).

Bless!

Statistically, yes. But do you know how many years that Windows Metafiles (remember .wmf files?) sat out in plain view, while all the time arbitrary executables could be embedded in them? Once the bad guys realised this, Microsoft published a patch fixing the issue, and they did it ASAP, not waiting for the next Patch Tuesday. That's rare, and shows how serious the problem was. So there could yet be problems that serious in Win10.

The best defence is to be careful. In thirty years of web surfing, my wife and I have picked up exactly one virus, and that was on a womens' craft site. The virus checker stomped it instantly.

But carry on doing the things you've presumably been doing for years, don't click on anything not known to be safe, don't click at all on links in emails unless you are certain it's from a friend, and so on.

Don't run normally with a computer administrator account on Windows, designate an admin account for times when it's needed and run as an unprivileged user for general surfing. I spent a couple of years advising on the Windows Small Business Server newsgroup, before it moved to a web forum, and in pretty much every case where a server had been hacked, it turned out that the domain admin had been web-surfing on it.

If you can stand it, disable JavaScript in your web browser, allowing it only for sites that really don't do what you need without it. It's a nuisance sometimes, but malicious JavaScript hacked into an innocent web page is a common malware vector. It also keeps the adverts down.

And so on...

I strongly suggest that if you want to be safe you upgrade to windows/11.

We are not talking "bugs" but security vulnerabilities. Once Microsoft ends support for an operating system it no longer records or acknowledges security vulnerabilities so you have no idea what holes there are...

.. but given that much of the code base is common between W10 and W11 you can be pretty sure many of the bugs discovered in W11 will be in W10. We also know that the hacker tools out there target vulnerabilities not OS versions so you are at risk of having exploits installed on your PC...

.. often these are nor viruses but things that can be exploited via PDF or Word documents...

these can be activated before your AV gets a look-in...

.. so I would say if you do anything serious, upgrade

Dave

There are some work-arounds. The most obvious one is to upgrade the SSD. Is that impossible to do?

Not sure. How would I load the OS?

you would clone the 128GB SSD onto e.g. a 256GB SSD (via some sort of USB adapter usually) then swap to the 256GB drive and upgrade Win10 to win11 with all that free-space.

Thanks for that advice, most of which I do anyway. There are only two operators, one with administrator rights which gets used occasionally when necessary, the other doesn't have those rights and is used for the rest of the time. Not sure about Javascript - I'll have a look.

I am super cautious about almost everything, and ISTR seeing a message saying the PC wasn't suitable for upgrading, which prompted this enquiry. I'll have another look just to make sure.

I also have a laptop that I don't use a lot, which is of similar age. I'll try playing around with that to see if it's upgradable.

Caveat: I don't know anything about LLMs, have not run one, am not buying hardware to run them. Too expensive for equipment that can run a reasonable cross-section of models.

For the wish to run an LLM AI right now, you can. It might not have voice synthesis though. This experience will be a lot better, than the Excel spreadsheet LLM someone built :-)

"In the research paper, which was posted on Arxiv as a work in progress, the researchers detail how they created the bitnet. Other groups have created bitnets before, but, the researchers say, most of their efforts are either post-training quantization (PTQ) methods applied to pre-trained full-precision models or native 1-bit models trained from scratch that were developed at a smaller scale in the first place. BitNet b1.58 2B4T is a native 1-bit LLM trained at scale; it only takes up 400MB, compared to other “small models” that can reach up to 4.8 GB." [You can run it on a toaster...]

With a 4096 token limit, it can't do really serious work, but it should still have some of the behaviors of a large model.

For standard models (using bigger number formats than the -1,0,1 model above), even with MMAP, you might want a machine with 1TB-2TB of *RAM*, plus a good video card. For example, a RTX5090 equipped with 96GB of GDDR (with enterprise pricing!), can use a group-of-experts model, where, say, a 35GB model is loaded fully into the video card, and can more efficiently process your question. By using a single video card, there are no bandwidth restrictions that result from using a multitude of smaller video cards. Using a big video card can be 7x faster for some things, because it does not need to do PCIe-to-PCIe DMA for transfers. It might take a series of those 35GB models to load, one at a time, from main memory. If the modules fit into system RAM, then you might not need to modify a copy of the model stored on an NVMe stick.

That might involve sixteen thousand worth of equipment. Whereas the tiny model above, can run on a toaster. More CPU cores are going to help in this case. I don't think it is single threaded. It's unclear whether it uses your whole machine, if you have a lot of cores for it to use

"Running BitNet b1.58 on Raspberry Pi (Install Guide & Testing) (9 days ago)"

At the current time, the most capable dedicated-NPUs are on laptops. Presumably the feeling is, that video cards are going to have a lot more TOPS to offer than a tile put inside the CPU package. The RTX5090 is

Current video cards, on purpose, only have "small RAM". That's not an accident. The two video card companies do not want to damage their market for really expensive cards. And putting four

The video card VBIOS, has crypto signing to control how much RAM it will use. You cannot solder different chips to a video card and magically get it to work. You need the correct VBIOS, and it is likely the GPU is marked at the factory in some way, regarding what VBIOS it will accept for configuration. This prevents third-parties from re-purposing restricted hardware.

Paul

USB stick?

Ah yes. "The processor doesn't currently meet Windows 11 system requirements"

and "The processor isn't currently supported for Windows 11"

As I thought.

I don't believe caution is enough. Exploits can be distributed via genuine web sites. Or even just going to a .org rather than a .com or visa versa. Disabling JavaScripts reduces the attack vectors but does not remove them. Many sites no longer use Javascript but leverage html 5...

.. go read a few of the current CVEs at

Dave

All browsers can disable JS totally, but that's a real pain, you have to keep turning it back on for sites that really won't work usefully without it, which is most of them these days.

If you use Firefox, there is the No-Script add-on, which allows you to do a blanket disable, then enable individual scripts on a site either temporarily until you close the tab, or permanently. You can also temporarily enable all scripts on a tab, which is important for when your retail site bungs you onto a card-pay site, where you will definitely need JS enabled.

It's still a bit of a faff, and there's no real way to know which JS provider sites are likely to be safe, but on the whole, you can permanently enable scripts on sites you're fairly sure are trustworthy (and remember, even Microsoft has had web pages hacked and malicious scripts inserted) so you can use your banking sites and the like without messing about.

OTOH, read this: