CoffeeFiend

or an Android tablet, or even a BlackBerry PlayBook for that matter. All are better than a Win8 tablet, and most likely all will cost less too (except perhaps the iPad which might be about the same price). I'm considering buying a PlayBook this weekend in fact. $250 for a high quality 7" tablet, 32GB of storage, a high quality 1024x600 multi-touch LCD, 802.11n and Bluetooth, a nice fast dual core ARM CPU and 1GB of RAM, GPS, USB and HDMI ports, 2 decent cameras, it plays most HD video, etc. And yes, all BlackBerry apps, and now Android apps as well! A Win8 WOA tablet with all of this (see MSI WindPad, ACER Iconia Tab, HP Slate, etc) would at the very least cost twice as much and I really don't see how it would be better in any way. And this is coming from someone who has been a MS fanboy for over 2 decades (Win8 will seemingly put an end to that)

Yes. And using Javascript, you could use a XMLHttpRequest or ServerXMLHTTP object to get the pages and then parse them using regular expressions. Now if only someone here thought of that before...

There's no luck at all. I hardly ever have friends, family or co-worker with virus problems (it's like one with an adware problem every 6 months or so -- and most the time it came bundled with an installer). I used to work at a site with 2000 PCs and it was months between each time we saw a virus. Honestly, your uncle is definitely doing something wrong like downloading malware-infested cracks/keygens and other stuff from shady places or running a very much unpatched system as admin and UAC disabled, or something along those lines. Exactly 100% of the time I've seen people with such problems it fell into one of those simple categories.

I don't really see why it's not working as you have modern browser versions Barely anything. We're using plain old Windows 7 x64 installs, with UAC untouched and such. The kids have regular user accounts. We mainly use Chrome as a browser, and Firefox as a 2nd choice. The kids' PCs have MSE on them (mine has no AV). We have a router running DD-WRT (firewall is disabled altogether on all the PCs). And we keep updated. The one and only thing I do to keep us safe on the internet (and because it's useless garbage I don't want of on my PC) is not to install the Oracle Java JRE. We really haven't done anything in particular to be very secure in any way, and the last malware we've caught dates from the XP pre-SP2 days. Even at work we basically never get anything. I'm not even sure how people even manage to catch malware these days. TL;DR: Nothing.

Your video card has nothing to do with it. What matters is: -do you have flash installed (the most popular way to see videos)? You already said no to that, so your only other option: -do you use a web browser that supports HTML5 and the video codecs youtube can serve? So what browser and which version of it are you using? For the record, I've had Flash installed for numerous years on all our PCs and we've never caught anything.

Exactly. The topic has already been beaten to death way too many times. Topic closed

Now that it might already be solved (haven't actually tried any solution but I trust Yzöwl), here's a PowerShell one-liner that does the job (i.e. looks inside all the htm files, figures out the old PDF name as downloaded, and renames all of them based on the title of the anchor tag -- assuming all htm and pdf files are in the same directory): gc *.htm|?{$_ -match [regex]'".*/(.*pdf)".*?b>(.*?)<'}|%{ren $matches[1] ($matches[2]+".pdf")} 5 minutes and 94 characters total

That's what I was saying earlier. Win8 on ARM is a Metro-only version of Windows -- and even then, Metro apps compiled with native x86 binaries (e.g. a C++/WinRT app) won't work either (not without recompiling for ARM specifically). So it offers absolutely nothing over an Android tablet or an iPad which both already have a vibrant market place, tons of devs, tons of apps, a far wider selection of tablets, etc. I mean, what's the point of Windows if it's without all the software that makes it useful in the first place, and also without all the drivers, without the backwards compatibility and basically everything else "regular old Windows" had going for it? Honestly, it might as well be a Windows Phone 7 device -- one which can't actually phone. The interface is like what people would expect on such a device, you won't be surprised when you find out it's locked down much like Apple's iDevices, you don't expect a phone to run regular old Windows apps and so on. People would also know to avoid it and they'd be spared from wasting time with it and returning it later. Then again, I bet you can find plenty of decent entry-level laptops with a uncrippled Win7 today than what the average Win8 ARM tablet's going to cost when they'll be out in a year. As for IE10 I honestly couldn't care less. I haven't been an IE user since 2003 or 2004 and couldn't be happier. Since I got rid of it we never caught malware of any kind, and the other browsers are overall: better featured, have better interfaces/usability, don't force you to update your OS to get the latest version, are faster for the most part (IE9 is still a dog according to the V8 benchmark, Peacekeeper benchmark, Kraken benchmark and others), etc. And most importantly for me they all have a large number of useful extensions and tools for different tasks ready to use. I only use IE as a last resort (the odd crappy website that uses ActiveX controls for example). It's no wonder IE's market share has been steadily declining for years. I don't see this trend reversing anytime soon either.

Hey, MS wouldn't be alone not to believe in Win 8 Personally, I'd rather pay the price of a Win8 license for another 10 years of continued support for Win7 x64... if only they would let us As for Win8, unless they end up letting us disable Metro (we'll see for sure in a week's time), I wouldn't upgrade to it even if it was a free upgrade.

From http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/products/system-requirements : Windows 7 system requirements If you want to run Windows 7 on your PC, here's what it takes: 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor 1 gigabyte (GB) RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB RAM (64-bit) 16 GB available hard disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit) DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver

And meanwhile I've done the complete opposite. I've mostly assumed he wasn't so sure what outbound meant in the first place, and that he was worried by the results on that GRC site and went from there It makes its protocol "guess" based on the TCP destination port (here it's 21 indeed).

and that makes perfect sense too: If File.Name = ".dmp" Then ...unless all of your files are called .dmp (no filename at all, just an extension). If your crash dump files have standard names (a filename and an extension) then it'll never even try to start windbg, so no output.

There is no central place for all of this that I'm aware of, nor am I a VBScript guru (I've mostly given up on it, and most of my VBScript knowledge dates back to the Win2k era, part of it being from writing classic ASP pages). As such I'm not certain what are the best resources out there today. But here's some bits and pieces that might help: Msxml2.ServerXMLHTTP.6.0 is one of several objects which you can use to get content from the web (just like web pages that use "AJAX" stuff). The Open method is what you use to initialize the object, which HTTP verb to use and the URL. The Send method is what actually makes the request and gets the response (HTML here) back in its ResponseText property, which I've later parsed using regular expressions. As for using regular expressions, the idea is to design them to have submatches for the content you want (the desired chunks surrounded by parentheses). Then you already have the info you want without further parsing or processing. And finally, the regular expressions explained: <a\shref="(/Dokumenter/dsweb/View/Collection-\d*)"> <a matches literal text \s matches a space href=" matches more literal text ( this marks the beginning of the information I'm interested in (the submatch which here is the URL of a child page) /Dokumenter/dsweb/View/Collection- matches some more literal text \d matches a numeric digit (0 to 9) * means that this previous digit can be present any amount of times (zero to infinity) ) marks the end of the information I care about "> matches literal text <a\shref="(/Dokumenter/dsweb/Get/Document.*pdf)"\sclass="uline"><b>(.*?)</b> <a matches literal text \s matches a space href=" matches more literal text ( this marks the beginning of the information I'm interested in (the submatch, which here is the URL of the PDF) /Dokumenter/dsweb/Get/Document matches literal text . matches any character * which is there zero times or more pdf matches more literal text ) marks the end of the information I care about " literal text \s space class="uline"><b> literal text ( marks the beginning on the text group of infos I want (next numbered submatch which is the desired filename for the PDF) . is still any old character *? is a "fancier" version of * which matches any amount of times, but keeping the selection as short as possible ) marks the end of the 2nd group </b> literal text I think this covers the most interesting parts Not that I use this myself for page scraping/parsing mind you.

That's a good point. Here's the VBScript again for those it might help at some point: Option Explicit Dim oXmlHttp, oRegExp, oMatch, adoStr, sChildPages(), i, url Set oXmlHttp = createobject ("Msxml2.ServerXMLHTTP.6.0") oXmlHttp.Open "GET", "http://www.slv.dk/Dokumenter/dsweb/View/Collection-357", False oXmlHttp.Send Set oRegExp = New RegExp oRegExp.IgnoreCase = True oRegExp.Global = True oRegExp.Pattern = "<a\shref=""(/Dokumenter/dsweb/View/Collection-\d*)"">" Set oMatch = oRegExp.Execute(oXmlHttp.ResponseText) If oMatch.Count = 0 Then WScript.Quit 'really ugly hack where we skip the first child page found (itself) ReDim sChildPages(oMatch.Count-2) For i = 1 to oMatch.Count-1 sChildPages(i-1) = "http://www.slv.dk" & oMatch.Item(i).Submatches(0) Next oRegExp.Pattern = "<a\shref=""(/Dokumenter/dsweb/Get/Document.*pdf)""\sclass=""uline""><b>(.*?)</b>" For Each url in sChildPages oXmlHttp.Open "GET", url, False oXmlHttp.Send Set oMatch = oRegExp.Execute(oXmlHttp.ResponseText) For i = 0 to oMatch.Count-1 DownloadBinaryFile "http://www.slv.dk" & oMatch.Item(i).Submatches(0), oMatch.Item(i).Submatches(1) & ".pdf" Next Next Function DownloadBinaryFile(sUrl, sFileName) oXmlHttp.Open "GET", sUrl, False oXmlHttp.Send Set adoStr = CreateObject("ADODB.Stream") adoStr.Type = 1 'adTypeBinary adoStr.Open adoStr.Write oXmlHttp.ResponseBody adoStr.SaveToFile sFileName, 2 'adSaveCreateOverWrite adoStr.Close End Function It's pretty ugly, there's no error handling of any kind and all that but it gets the job done. Writing essentially the same thing in other languages should be pretty straightforward too (most of the work here is getting the regular expressions right). And in most cases it would be nicer/better/simpler too (VBScript data structures suck hard, downloading binary files here is a bit of a hack, error handling is beyond awful, etc).

You can't. If you block that, then *nothing* can connect to the internet (no web browser or anything). If you're worried about a particular application connecting to the internet, then sure, why not. The inbound ports are most likely already blocked on both his firewall and his router. They are not opened by default on the Windows firewall, nor are they forwarded to an IP address by default by the router -- so you'd have to go out of your way to set that up yourself. It's just that his router has some services running on it (for its internal use) but which don't actually accept connections from anybody (like I said previously, it just resets the TCP connection on you, no data is ever sent, and it's not coming from his PC either). These ports used by the router's firmware (which again just reset the connection on you) are what's being reported by GRC's website. So no, it doesn't really matter and he's secure -- unless your concern is that you're able to connect to websites, ftp sites and stuff like that on the internet.

That's exactly what I'm saying. These are inbound ports which your modem/router (model unknown) has opened and it has nothing to do with what Tripredacus is saying (he's checking if you can connect to an external ftp site, much like you can test if you could connect to a web server -- totally and completely unrelated to those GRC results). Not that those "opened" ports of yours can actually be used for malicious activity.

Edit: forget it then. My solution (now removed) made too much sense I guess i.e. parsing the main page for its 5 child pages' URLs, parsing the child pages for the PDFs in them, and then downloading the PDFs while saving with the proper names in the first place (using VBScript as a language, ServerXMLHTTP to make HTTP requests, and Regular Expressions to extract information from the HTML). Have fun stringing hunks of archaic 1980's technology (cryptic batch files) together with non built-in tools only to end up with the same results, but via many unnecessary steps and over-complications, adding external dependencies in the process, while steering clear of anything remotely modern if that's your thing.

I completely agree. And yet there are so many other options, some of which may work better depending on the specifics. The first thing that comes to mind (assuming that the HTML anchor is easy to find always in the same place in every page, or that there's only ever one anchor tag linking to a PDF per page -- but that's a big if for sure) I'd extract the info from the HTML tag first (looping through the HTML pages), and rename the file based on that. So many ways... Even just for getting at that HTML anchor tag itself (plain old string search, using the DOM, regular expressions, using a HTML or SGML parser, etc). But yes, without more details we're just wasting time.

^ A million times this. Too many asking small questions to hack together disjointed parts of a script, without a clear goal in mind. And if that's the case (the parsing html to rename PDF files description you just gave) then that's totally not how I would do it (not that I imply my own method is the one and only way or anything)

This is usually a very good description of the problem. Does C:\Program Files\Debugging Tools for Windows\WinDbg.exe actually exist? Because it says it can't find it. Obviously WinDbg has to be installed, and that's not the proper path for it if you're running a x64 version of Windows either.

Yes, but his main concern seems to be: and not that he's actually able to connect to websites, ftp servers, torrents and so on. These are dynamic ports. They'll be different the next time you try, or if you connect to something else, or if you try it on a different PC, or if somebody else tries it (hence the "dynamic" name -- these are also called ephemeral ports). It's perfectly normal that you're listening on that port range when you make a connection of any type (unless you're using an older version of Windows which uses a lower port range), be it for web pages, ftp sites or whatever. It's how TCP/IP connections work (using source/destination ports). There's nothing about it

But what you posted i.e. using ftp.exe to connect to another server means absolutely NOTHING about your own ports being opened (as shown on GRC's website). This just means you are able to connect to someone else which is typically what people want -- just like you're able to connect to web servers to see web pages. Unfortunately, if you want them to display anything else than "opened", then you'll most likely need another modem/router. Since none of the traffic is reaching your computer, there's no settings you can change there to affect that. You should talk to your ISP about them using these ports on your modem if anything.

and that problem is that you're able to connect to stuff on the internet? I honestly don't see how this is a problem in any way. You're perfectly safe.

The flag was too familar a symbol for the Windows we know and love. So for the MS Bob 2012 Win8 they designed a new logo. It's like if they want to send a message: This isn't the Windows you like and expect so we've changed the logo to reflect that. Not only Win8 is awful, but now even its logo is. This things screams "mediocre".

No. It's most likely the configuration of your modem/router device (and that was probably done by your ISP too, and you might not even be able to change that). Again, there's no need to worry.