JorgeA

which is BTW very good for the children and kids (as it helps their growth, fantasy, and what not) but that traditionally tends to get the grown-ups mad at them . I will repeat that there is a difference between playing and working. Try a Ruzzle or Candy Crush round on a mouse+keyboard , but also try making an Excel spreadsheet or an Autocad drawing with just the touch screen .... jaclaz That's a very funny (and apt) image! So we're facing, on our PCs, the age-old struggle between order and chaos... Good point BTW - indeed, the level of abstraction is fundamental. --JorgeA

Very nice. The MetroTard's graphic (and logic) makes zero sense. Repeating the unremembered past means doing something that had been done before but isn't being done currently (hence the new generation can't remember what it was like). The Windows 7 Start Menu is neither a break from current practice nor a return to an earlier one, but rather an evolutionary development in a steady, unbroken progression from the Windows 95 Start Menu. Metro, OTOH, does fit the "can't remember the past hence repeating it" model. It's a return to the bad old days of Windows 3.x where the user was presented with all the program icons grouped on the screen (as in the Metro Start Screen) and if you maximized one of them there was no way to just see at a glance what else was also open (exactly as in the "immersive" Metro UI). That interface never made any sense to me and I never got used to it. For me, the Start Menu was a stroke of design genius as I slipped right into it like a custom-made shoe. Why would I want to go back to the same sort of cr*p thing that came before it? --JorgeA

Sounds plausible. Not long after he left, they started to backtrack on enforcing Metro, with the return of the (pseudo-)Start Button and especially with the new option to boot direclty to the Desktop. Steven S. wasn't the only member of the Metro gang, but he was (shall we say) the ringleader. --JorgeA

Everybody (including Dedoimedo in the links above) seems to rave about EMET, but our family's experience with it has been much less than stellar. As I wrote back then, "User beware." If only I or if only my wife had had a problem using it, that'd be one thing, but both of us (on separate computers using different versions of Windows) had bad experiences with it. --JorgeA

These two blog postings might shed some light of the issue of XP security, both absolutely and relative to other versions of Windows: Windows XP death - What gives? What to do after Windows XP dies in April 2014? I still suspect that the posited vulnerabilities of XP are not unlike some of those scary headlines about pharmaceutical studies, reporting how Drug X "increases the risk of condition Y by 33%," when the actual, raw risk has increased from 3 in 1,000,000 to 4 in 1,000,000. --JorgeA

Maybe these links will be of some use to the current discussion: Need to Know: Windows 8.1 Update 1 and Windows Phone 8.1Microsoft's Windows 8.1 Update 1: Rumored release target is March 11 Microsoft to share Windows Threshold plans at Build 2014 show: Report "Threshold" to be Called Windows 9, Ship in April 2015--JorgeA

Whatever label they put on what they're said to be releasing this March, my understanding of it is that "Windows 9" is slated to come out in the spring of 2015. This spring's release could be 8.2, or 8.1 Update 1, something else??? -- it boggles my mind as to why they keep messing around with the nomenclature. [speculation] Maybe the confusion is a deliberate attempt to get the public away from thinking in terms of discrete service packs or OS releases, in preparation for the Brave New World when we're all good little boys and girls accepting our automatic updates unquestioningly and are all on the same version at the same time. Hail, Caesar!! [/speculation] --JorgeA

Thanks, guys. I'm not a heavy XP user (Vista and 7 are my main OS's now), but I'm curious because of all the warnings that have been coming out of Redmond and other places concerning how unsafe XP will be in just a few months. Over in the "Deeper Impressions" thread I think the tendency would be to believe this is largely FUD, so I was hoping to get some measure of how widespread the "average" Windows exploit has actually been in the past (preferably in terms of percentages of Windows PCs, to dodge the "growing and splintering market" issue). As they say in the investing world, definitely "past performance is not a guide to future performance," but at least the observer might get some ballpark idea rather than groping in the dark as we seem to be forced to do. But if the numbers (stats) just don't exist, or are not publicly available, then it's a moot point. Thanks again. --JorgeA P.S. Just thought of something. I seem to remember occasionally running across stats for infected computers in countries where Windows piracy is said to be widespread and Windows PCs don't receive the monthly patches. Maybe that could serve as a sort of proxy for future unpatched XP systems, with the provisos that the numbers would be for "all" infections (not a per-infection average) and that such machines might also lack other basic protections such as current AV software and so forth.

How about, historically? I'm trying to get a read on the magnitude of the question (based on historical experience). --JorgeA

Do you (or anyone else reading this) have a handle on either the proportion (percentage) or the absolute numbers of computers that are affected by individual vulnerabilities patched by the monthly Windows Updates? Reading the patch descriptions, a lot of these vulnerabilities sound like awfully remote risks, or else they require special circumstances like the attacker having physical access to the machine. I'm just wondering how much more exposed an XP box will really be after April (or May) 2014, compared to (say) today when the OS is still getting patches. --JorgeA

Wow, awesome, context menus on the right click!!! At this rate of intellectual penetration they'll have Windows 95 fully reinvented by 2020 or so. LOL Well, they brought back opaque windows from pre-Vista days, and non-overlapping windows from Windows 1.0 (or was it 2.0). Who knows how far back they'll regress in the name of progress. All cheered on, of course, as the latest and greatest by the Neowin folks... --JorgeA

Leo, Mary Jo, and Paul had an in-depth discussion of Threshold and the future of the Windows Desktop in Windows Weekly 339. This excerpt starts at 23:47 (although the whole preceding discussion bears hearing): [emphasis added] Also check out Paul's comment immediately following the above exchange. Then at 37:49, there's the following discussion of touch-screen computing: --JorgeA

Thank you, jaclaz. This is very helpful. I'll try the reinstall this week when I have a chunk of time to devote to the process. BTW, out of curiosity I rebooted that PC and hit F11 from the splash-screen menu to try and reach the HP Backup and Recovery Manager, and it did get me in there. The first option is to "Recover PC to a specific point in time" and the third option is to "Back up files." The most interesting option for our purposes here is the middle one: "Recover PC's factory installed operating system, drivers, utilities and applications." That said, I wasn't brave enough to test what would have happened after the next screen, which warned that "This will remove all applications, drivers, and user data added to the system since the factory installation. Would you like to continue?" So while I can't be certain that the recovery partition is indeed accessible, getting this far is suggestive: where else would these initial recovery screens and menus reside? --JorgeA ADDENDUM: When I rebooted after poking around in the recovery partition, GRUB was gone and the only boot choices were either Vista or "previous version of Windows." So I found and applied the GRUB rescue procedure given here (I used the Netrunner Live CD), and now I have recovered all the options at boot time. I'm wondering if I can perform this procedure instead, should the boot options get messed up (again) after the XP reinstall.

Welcome to the ranks of Vista users. (A small club, sorry to say.) --JorgeA

Well that sure is creepy. They are one step away from cultivating a cadre of embedded spies, "government-youth", reminiscent of previous totalitarian examples. All they need now is a bait on the hook so the kids rush to give up information in exchange for something like badges and points. It could evolve into a completely new method to access the homes of the sheeple. Disgusting. Yeah, that IS creepy. And they're getting to them from all sides: British school children subjected to NSA-style surveillance Train them while they're young, get 'em used to the idea of being constantly watched. No doubt this is how Winston Smith's world came to pass. --JorgeA

Wait what? That used to be calculated as Revenue-Costs=Profit. This must be some of that NuMath where a net loss is a actually a gain. What am I missing here? You have company in being skeptical of MSFT's figures! --JorgeA

This is great, thank you very much! Since I'm not familiar (AFAIK) with any tool that provides direct disk access, I may as well start learning with the one you recommend. --JorgeA

LOL! But thanks. Hopefully we won't need it. As a Plan B (and C), I also have a set of Recovery Disks created via Windows, plus an image of the HDD. Also, I appreciate the warning about that recovery partition. I shouldn't count on it. Maybe I should try and test it, to see what happens. You're welcome to bow back in anytime. Thanks again. --JorgeA

Not really (in detecting if it is GRUB or GRUB2) but it does tell us that your "main" bootmanager is the GRUB or GRUB 2, which has only two entries, one of which chainloads your secondary bootmanager (which is the Vista BOOTMGR). But still you can get to the GRUB (or GRUB2) in two ways: GRUB (or GRUB2) code in the MBR + hidden sectors <- please read as "installed to the disk" "normal" MBR and GRUB (or GRUB2) code in the PBR of the active partition <- please read as "installed to the partition"Now, HOW (EXACTLY) is your hard disk partitioned? WHICH is the active partition? Can you find (likely on the "Linux" partition) files core.img and grub.cfg (possibly in a \boot\ folder? <- this would mean that it is GRUB2 alright jaclaz For the sake of completeness, I should report that the initial boot menu also contains three other choices: Netrunner with "advanced options" and then two memory test items.With that out of the way, according to the KDE Partition Manager this is the info for the HDD. I don't think we can do tables on the forum here, but I'll do what I can.PARTITION, TYPE, SIZE, FLAGS [<--- REMARKS] /dev/sda1, ntfs, 58.59 GiB, boot <--- this is the XP partition (primary) /dev/sda3, ntfs, 195.01 GiB, --- <--- this is the Vista partition (primary) /dev/sda4, extended, 28.49 GiB, --- <--- this is the Netrunner partition, which contains the following two logical partitions -- /dev/sda5, ext4, 25.53 GiB, --- <--- this contains the Netrunner OS, applications, and data /dev/sda6, linuxswap, 2.96 GiB, --- <--- self-explanatory /dev/sda2, ntfs, 16.00 GiB, --- <--- this is the HP Recovery partition (primary) I can provide more details about these partitions if you need them. Had to boot back into Windows to get the active partition information, but here it is: the XP partition is the active drive. Disk Management (in Vista) also reports that drive (C:) as "system," whereas the Vista partition (F:) is "boot." (Which seems to differ from what the KDE Partition Manager said, that the XP partition was "boot," but that may be simply because the Vista drive was the one I ultimately booted into today (?). )I did indeed find the two files, core.img (in boot > grub > i386-pc) and grub.cfg (in boot > grub), so according to what you said it must in fact be GRUB2.Let me know what I need to do next, thanks! --JorgeA

A couple of ideas. Apologies if you've already tried them: Semi-wild guess, but how about looking for the Bing Desktop in Control Panel --> Programs --> Turn Windows features on or off (under "Programs and Features")? Does a process show up for Bing Desktop in Task Manager? If so, then you may be able to kill the process there and then delete it via Spacemonger. (You may have to go deeper and disable a service before you can kill the process.)--JorgeA

Very well. The question then becomes: how to find out which of those two ways Netrunner used to install its boot manager. How do we do that? As to which version of GRUB is in use, I'm thinking it must be GRUB2. The reason is that last year I had Zorin OS 5.2 installed in that Linux partition. The options during boot were different than they are now -- I remember that they gave both XP and Vista in the initial selection menu, but then also that if you selected the XP option from that menu, it would screw up the booting afterward. (If you wanted to go into XP, it was better to select Vista and then the "previous OS" option in the next menu.) When I installed Netrunner 12.12 in place of Zorin 5.2, there was a new boot menu with more sensible (less dangerous) options: now in the first menu you select either Netrunner or "Vista," and then if you select the "Vista" option the next menu offers a choice of Vista or a "previous" version of Windows. So whether it's GRUB2 specifically I don't know, but it is definitely a different version, and a better one in that respect at least. Hope this helps in our detective work. --JorgeA

More welcome bits from Paul Thurrott: Windows 8.1 Update 1 Preview: More Good News for PC Users [emnphasis in original] A kind of UI choice, maybe? It'll be mouse-friendly if you use a mouse, and touch-friendly if you touch the screen? [emnphasis in original] All well and good. It remains to be seen whether these represent steps on the way to recovery of a fully developed Desktop, or if they are simply concessions to make the OS less unpalatable for retrograde, old-fashioned, unhip Desktop users. --JorgeA

Translation: Your data will be reviewed, cataloged and marked as to whether you are a threat (now) or not. But, this will all be done in Europe, so your data never left Europe, just like we said. Isn't this brave new world a great place? bpalone You read that like a lawyer... which no doubt is the way Microsoft's lawyers wrote it. Reminds me of the married lawyer (true story) who would go by himself to conventions and tell prospective dates that he was "separated" from his wife. (Literally true, by a few hundred miles.) --JorgeA

Huh, that's interesting. Good thing I have an image of that whole disk (all three OS's). --JorgeA

Excellent advice, which I will follow. --JorgeA P.S. I forgot to comment about HDD failures. I've had two of them (in laptops) in the last year, on different machines. Macrium Reflect (free edition) has been a very good friend in these cases. (OTOH, I had a Seagate Replica external drive which claimed to keep a "bare metal" image that could be restored if disaster struck. Well, disaster did strike my laptop and the Replica software was worthless. Macrium to the rescue!)