Nomen

I seem to recall that win-7 has some sort of validation that runs as a service, and if you disable it you will get a message on your desktop along the lines of "your copy of windows may not be genuine" or something like that. Does Win-10 have the same thing? Also, I'm very familliar with XP and how it's validation was tied to a bunch of different hardware fingerprints and you needed 5 or 6 "votes" for it to continue to think that it's a valid install otherwise it would need to re-validate itself. There was even a program (xpinfo.exe) that would tell you which hardware elements were contributing (or not) to this vote scheme. I'm not sure if Win-7 works the same way in this regard as XP does, and likewise no idea how win-10 operates in this regard. If win-10 does the same thing as XP, is there software available that will show me the validation status based on hardware fingerprint?

I don't understand the relationship between the motherboard RAM architecture or RAM sub-system and the M.2 interface. The HP computer in question has (1) NVMe 2242 and (1) NVMe 2280. The smaller one is used by the installed wifi/BT card. I assume I can install an SSD in the larger one? I read somewhere that M.2 SATA is not supported.

I'm pretty sure its a S01-pF1013w. The HP service app on it said that the 1 year HP warranty expired just a couple months ago. This thing looks brand new, not sure where these come from, maybe leased? For what it has, I think the $170 I paid for it ($125 USD) is a steal. Came with a new mouse and keyboard. 1 TB internal hard drive, 4 gb ram, 4 USB-3 ports in front (which for some reason HP doesn't refer to as USB 3 but as "SuperSpeed USB Type-A"). Yes, I see that it will be limited to 32 gb ram (2 x 16 gb) but I'm not planning to go beyond 8 gb. Just wanted to make sure Win-10 home wasn't limited to 4 gb. I see that 4 gb DDR-4 ram is somewhat hard to find (locally). Having 2 sticks of 4 gb would be faster than a single stick of 8 - yes? Dual Channel?

OK, after some searching I've found directly from M$ that the "physical" ram limits for Win-10 home is 128 gb vs 2 TB for Pro. I don't know how it's even possible to generally have more than what, 64 gb of installed ram in your "average" desktop computer. So basically there is no real distinction in terms of max installed ram when you're looking at Home vs Pro. This is a big difference compared to Win-7. M$ created more low-budget versions of Win-7. Win-7 "Starter" was limited to 2 gb and was only x86. Win-7 home basic (x64) was limited to 8 gb and Home premium (x64) was limited to 16 gb.

The point is that when you buy new or refurbished hardware, it's already going to have win-10 "installed" on it, and there won't be any media disk for you to use to "install it yourself". So the only thing you can do is to go through the motions when you take it out of the box and turn it on. It's going to ask for any info it can to identify a pre-existing microsoft account. Your only option is to give it a phone number that you've never given to M$ before. And I'll ask again, does win-10 home have any set ram limits? How exactly is win-10 home handicapped vs some other flavor of win-10?

I've picked up an HP Slim Desktop Celeron G5900 as a refurbed unit. It has 4gb and Windows-10 home 64 bit. I was wondering if there are any RAM limits for W-10 home (ie maybe it's limited to 4 gb?) otherwise I was thinking of throwing another 4 gb ram into it (I'm guessing it would help performance?). I'm somewhat new to win-10, but I see if I'm going to migrate some PC's from 7 to 10 I'm going to have to dig into this a bit. One of the things I'm not liking is when you go through the initial power-on phase of a system with pre-installed win-10 is that it wants you to have a microsoft account (instead of a local account) and there doesn't seem to be a way to bypass that. Beyond that, has anyone come up with a single "god-mode" or "power-user" package that will make all the mods that you'll eventually stumble on doing over time as you hammer and mold a stock/retail win-10 installtion into something more useful for a power user? Like taking ownership of the /etc folder so you can control the hosts file? Turning off all crap services, uninstalling all the stuff you won't use (or will refuse to use on principle) like office 360, onedrive, etc?

Roytam came up with Retrozilla - yes? I've been using that for a while now on my win-98 systems (which do not log into any websites). I usually have to set the View Style to None to make a site useful to view, but it works for what I do on those systems. Regarding chrome - I've stayed clear of chrome on any other PC I have (which are win-7) because of my "perception" (which could be wrong?) that chrome is tied in too heavily to google (in terms of backdoor, telemetry, etc). Is my perception correct? I would feel comfortable using a "chromium" based browser if it was as disconnected from Google as Firefox is (or can be) from Mozilla. Are there links to download packages / installers for the top candidates mentioned here (360 Chrome and DC Browser) or do I have to figure out how to actually get my hands on them?

I know it's lame to just jump in here and ask, I know that a lot of work has gone into exploring, modifying, creating these browsers, but I just don't have time to come up to speed and understand it all. A computer I built for a relative on hardware that's about 10 years old is running XP but the browser is holding him back and the choice is to either find a browser that works or somehow put windows 7 on the PC. So I'd like to try what-ever is the most turn-key solution to giving an XP system the most reliable, compatible and secure (malware-free) browser. So can someone point me to which-ever browser project fits that bill?

I figure I'd ask this here, as FF2 is still pretty functional for me for the sites I go to on my Win-98 systems but nowhere else are you going to get FF2 support or interest. There's a website I hit that always give me the error "n.bind is not a function" and references a particular .js file. There's a setting in about:config (layout.css.report.errors) that I've changed from True to False but that changed nothing. Some suggestions I've found say to disable it through the Web Developer toolbar, but I have no such toolbar installed nor do I see "web developer" under the tools drop-down. Is there anything I can add to about:config to disable error console popups? Bonus question: Because of some mods I've done in my hosts file, I frequently get the "Security error: Domain Name Mismatch" error window. Is there any way to disable that?

I extracted the files advapi32.dll (98 kb vs original 605 kb), advapibase.dll and ntext.dll from George's mediafire link. My version of winrar must be incompatible with the .7z file in question, I had to download and install a trial version of winzip to extract the files. I placed those 3 files in my c:\windows\system32 folder. I did this by booting the PC into DOS (I have XP running on a FAT32 drive in this PC, the boot menu gives me the choice to boot into DOS or XP). Otherwise XP was interfering with me changing advapi32.dll while XP was running. I made a backup copy of advapi32.dll first. With the changes, XP started fine, no indications of anything wrong. I checked and advapi32.dll was not replaced by a version from the dllcache. I thought I might have to register advapibase.dll but my attempt to do that resulted in a DLLRegisterServer entry point not found message. But XP was up and running, so if this is an important system DLL then it seems to be working. I ran the TWS offline installation file, and son of a gun it worked! The application installed the newer version of TWS with no issues. Now, would it run? Yes! So thank you George for the info about One-Core-Api. And also thank you Gerwin, I had a look at the github project you posted and was trying to decide which one to try first.

The install file in question (Interactive Brokers TWS offline installer for 32 bit Version 981.3m) does in fact run on Windows 7 (32 bit) so I don't know if this is a 32/64 bit issue or not. And - my full name is Nomen Nescio.

I'm trying to install an application on an XP-SP3 (32 bit) that claims to be compiled for windows-x86. I am currently running a previous version of this application. I am trying to run the offline installation package for it. I am getting this error: The procedure entry point RegGetValueA could not be located in the dynamic link library ADVAPI32.DLL. Some web-searches I've done might be indicating that that function is only available when running XP 64 bit? Anyways, I have version 5.1.2600.6987 (12/17/2015). Any chance that there is a more recent version that might have this function? There is KernelEx for XP isin't there? Might it help with this?

There's a difference between "supporting windows 7" and being "compatible with windows 7". You would think that to avoid customer confusion and to avail yourself to every possible sales opportunity you would add Windows 7 (and even XP) to your COMPATIBILITY list. Perhaps, having been pre-formatted as FAT32, they have some sort of arrangement with microsoft that stipulates that they can't have Win-7 on the compatibility list if MSFT doesn't want to see it there.

I was looking through the website of a local computer/electronics store and going through their selection of USB thumb drives. I needed to buy a couple, didn't have to be larger than 8 gb or be USB 3 but you can't find anything less than 16 or even 32 gb these days and apparently even finding USB-2 is not possible at this particular store. I settled on this: Kingston DataTraveler Kyson, 32GB USB 3.2 Gen 1 I assumed it would "just work" when plugged into any old-school USB 2 port, but still I wanted to find some tech specs saying that. On Kingston's own website, they say this: Compatible with Windows® 10, 8.1, 8, Mac OS (v.10.10.x +), Linux (v. 2.6.x +), Chrome OS™ Hmmm. Why only Windows 8/10 ? What sort of magic does this drive have that it's not even compatible with Win-7? It doesn't even explicitly say "compatible with USB 2" port - is that such a big deal to say? I bought a couple. About $10 each. I've tried one. Plugged it into my Win-98 PC (pretty close to a 20-year-old socket-478 P4 Soyo motherboard) and Win-98 recognizes the drive just fine. Scandisk, chkdsk, no problem. They report the drive is FAT-32 formatted, 16kb size allocation units. I'm assuming that Windows 7 will also see this drive and be fine with it. So why does Kingston leave out Win-7 on the OS compatibility list? They go out of their way to say "10, 8.1, 8" - why not instead just say "Windows (all versions)" ? Now I will say that on the package, on the back, is a small chart, showing the various OS classes on one axis and USB-2 and USB 3 on the other axis, with checkmarks filled in showing yes, every listed OS is compatible with both USB-2 and USB-3. But even on the Windows line, they again list Windows 10, 8.1, 8. Plenty of room to add a 7 on that line. Strange. Maybe they think people would equate seeing win-7 with product age or technological inferiority?

Thanks! Github is always a confusing place for me to navigate. But yes, I found what you are talking about here: https://github.com/nalexandru/api-ms-win-core-path-HACK/releases/tag/0.3.1 And yes, placing the dll in system32 did the trick. I guess this would also be needed for 64-bit Win-7? The program I'm running is also based on python. For more on this issue, see the following: https://vigilance.fr/vulnerability/Python-executing-DLL-code-via-Windows-7-api-ms-win-core-path-l1-1-0-dll-31456 https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/561c59777c8426fde0ef48b57cf02eddaeb2a5b8 (that's where I see reference to the KB's) https://www.smartftp.com/en-us/support/kb/2695

This is Win-7, 32 bit. I'm trying to run a program and I get this error: "The program can't start because api-ms-win-core-path-l1-1-0.dll is missing from your computer." I see lots of similar issues for that particular dll and pretty much zero resolution for it. Seems to be specific problem for win-7, possibly that file originated with windows 8? I've gone down a few rabbit holes looking for a solution, and one path points to windows6.1-kb2533623-x86.msu as a possible solution. The only place I was able to find it was the wayback machine. I ran it, but it said it didn't apply to my system (?). That KB is possibly superceded by kb2758857. I have obtained a version of that one, I haven't run it yet. Another rabbit hole indicated that vc_redist.x86.exe (Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable) might fix the problem, but I ran that, and the problem remains. Does anyone running Win8 or higher have that file? (api-ms-win-core-path-l1-1-0.dll) I'm just wondering for what versions of windoze can that file be found on, and why not for win-7. And if anyone has any answers for what kb2533623 / kb2758857 were for?

I'd like to think we were all living a little vicariously through John the last few years. The photo's of him holding a rifle in the jungle, who could argue with that?

I have both grep and qgrep on my win-7 system (and qgrep on my win-98 system) and generally I can get it to do what I want. But a current task is really p***ing me off. I want to extract from my router's log files all lines that contain "SRC=18." I don't want lines that contain "SRC=186.43.what-ever". Just the lines where the first octet is 18. not 185 or 189, etc. My command line is [qgrep -e "SRC=18." *.log > out.txt] But my output always includes 18n. and 18. It's as if the "." is being completely ignored in the search string. It doesn't matter if I put the search string in quotes or not. Any ideas? Edit: see also https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10346816/using-grep-to-search-for-a-string-that-has-a-dot-in-it :-( Edit: Ok, all I needed to do was put the period inside square brackets. Don't need to put quotes around the whole thing either.

What is the fundamental flaw in browser technology that makes "page parking" such a performance / memory hit for browsers? What on earth is going on in the background that is causing browsers to eat up memory for pages that I think are not really doing anything and that I'm not even looking at?

Right now I have FF ESR 52.9.0 with 24 tabs, Seamonkey 2.53.7.1 with maybe 18 tabs. I was using I think FF 39 but a few things really didn't work correctly (like entering posts on this site but reading was ok). Dell Latitude 6420 with core i-7 and 4 gb ram, win-7 ultimate with 4 gb ram. Memory useage - Seamonkey and FF are both creeping up as I watch task manager window, Seamonkey is 636 mb, FF is 738 mb. Seamonkey has 16 tabs, one is streaming audio from a website (local EMS/fire scanner) but the other tabs are mostly ebay items. Thunderbird is 195 mb (static) and dwm.exe is 61 mb. 56 total processes, CPU usage 5 to 12%, physical memory 85%. Looking again at FF memory usage is now 793 mb. (I left the computer running for an hour, get back and see it's under 700 mb). At some point some graphics elements in FF web pages starts to become black boxes or graphics are distorted and that's when I know I have to shut-down FF and restart it. That seems to happen if I have 40 to 50 tabs. FF can be stable with that many tabs but if I do an address-map lookup in google and open the map view that will usually tip FF over and it will become unstable soon after. FF tabs are (4) web forums, (3) google search results, (5) financial charts or info (2 static, 3 real time charts), the rest are to web sites with static info of some sort that I want to keep open / quickly available until I'm done with them (but some I will not look at for maybe weeks at a time). If I find a reason to open a page because it contains something interesting or useful for the moment I tend not to close it until I'm absolutely sure I won't need to hunt for it again. I will occasionally bookmark all open pages but I rarely call up bookmarked pages because I find the FF bookmark interface inefficient or clumsey to use. When I kill FF (sometimes I have to use task manager) and open it again I will select last browser session (which was the last session when FF was closed while it was stable) and all tabs at that time are re-loaded. I'd like to know more about cross-site info "stealing" and if there are settings to prevent that - how. I do use noscript and de-activate MANY sites (double-click, amazon, fecebook, various google-ad things, etc). Very large HOSTS file also in use.

Is there an add-on or something that will tell me / show me the memory usage of individual tabs? And / or browser settings that limit or stop page caching or other junk like that?

Is there a forum anywhere on the net where the topic is either browser choices and advanced config / optimizations for Win-7, or perhaps more specifically a Firefox forum focused on using older versions of FF? I'd like to keep using FF 5x on Win-7/32 and I want add-ons like RIP / Nuke This / No Script (etc) to work properly. I also want to be able to keep 25 to 50 tabs open without the browser kacking every few days because it's got a memory leak or something causing it to consume 500 to 800 mb of ram.

This Del e6230 gave me the option in bios to boot UEFI or legacy, and because I'm old school I chose legacy and because of that there's no access to MSDM table - yes? But there is a SLIC table, most likey containing win-7 OEM key. But the MSDM table would contain what- win-8 or maybe even win-10 key? Bigger question - even if I did set for secure boot uefi would a fresh install of win-10 on wiped drive pick up the oem win-10 key automatically?

Man, what a battle it was to remove the system's ability to mess with my version of the hosts file. Disabling inheritance and taking ownership of the /etc folder was I think the primary thing that had to be done, and first removing everything from being able to access it (and the hosts file) except me and then adding in SYSTEM and ALL APPLICATION PACKAGES with read-only access. Before that I downloaded something called "configuredefender.exe" and thought I applied a restriction on the /etc folder but this didn't seem to work. I don't think there is anything like a config interface in control panel for Defender in Win-10 like there is for other windoze versions. And again, I don't know technically if this is "Windows Defender" or "Microsoft Defender" we're talking about here.

I've installed a "take ownership" reg key and have modified the hosts file but something (I think it's Defender) keeps messing with it. They say that you can tell Defender to not mess with chosen files / folders. But I can't find any settings for "Defender". I can only find settings for "Windows Defender Firewall". So what's the deal here? Is there a "Windows Defender" on a win-10 system, and is it separate from the firewall? In any case, how do I disable these security scans for selected files/folders?