FranceBB

The support may be over, but this doesn't mean that people stopped using XP. Today I've been to the dentist and he is using XP. When I asked him why, he said that XP is connected to the sensors of the tools he uses on a daily basis and that he upgraded to Windows 10 months ago as he changed his computer, however the technician he called spent hours trying to make it work with those sensors but he failed, so he reverted to Windows XP. "I've been using these things since 2005" he said, "I'm gonna keep using XP until I'll change the whole thing, its tools and its sensors, which is unlikely to happen anytime soon". Since I wasn't able to take a clear shot, I told him about the Windows XP Spotter group and I quickly told him that we take pictures of XP running in businesses 'cause we are fan of the OS, so he kindly let me take this picture:

It says that "The vulnerability doesn't affect Windows 8.1 or 10 (or Server variants starting with 2012), but it does affect Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2". Windows Server 2008 R2 is based on Windows 7, but the 2008 version is based on Vista, so I'm pretty sure that Vista is also affected.

Fingers crossed for a hero to leak them.

Hi, I gotta buy a new repeater as I have to repeat the WiFi signal from a place to another. Every router/repeater I have doesn't support WPA2 Enterprise, but only supports standard WEP/WPA/WPA2 protocols. I also have an Asus RT-N12+ firmware 3.0.0.4.378_6981. The router finds the network correctly, however I can't connect to it as it says "unsupported authentication method". According to the support page, it should support WPA Enterprise authentication method, though https://www.asus.com/Networking/RTN12Plus/specifications/ but later on I found out that it was only if it was used as router and not as repeater... I also updated it to the latest version of the firmware, but it didn't change anything: I also have other repeaters like a TP-Link and another one from another brand but they both don't support WPA2 Enterprise, so I'm here to ask you which repeater you would suggest to extend my WPA2 Enterprise network without spending an eye and a leg. Thank you in advance, Frank.

I can't really stand duck duck go and I use the whole Google ecosystem: Google as search engine, Gmail, Android, Google Assistant, Google Drive and so on. I mean, c'mon people, let's face it, Google is the best search engine available, it has many useful services and many of them are free. Yes, the fact that NSA and MI6 can access my data as easily as Thanos snaps his fingers does annoy me, but since I don't do anything wrong and those agencies are working to keep our country safe I say "it doesn't matter". As to my connection, I do use a VPN every time I visit Italy and I turn it off as soon as I go back to the UK.

Speaking of .NET Framework, Microsoft is gonna release the new .NET Framework 5.0 on November 2020. They can't wait to drop Windows 7 and do to it what they have done to XP, I guess...

No 1: No 2: Four attempts, no luck. It's not easy for countless reasons that I don't wanna keep repeating in each and every post. I'm becoming pragmatic: the modified source code is there and available. Wanna help? Publish commits, otherwise being yet another person asking for it won't help us. Yes, we do want Chromium on XP, but don't expect to have it by some sort of magic stick that makes it work. I had four goes at it, trying to backport it, working together with @Dibya and Samuel, but we failed. The last attempt got very close, but guess what? It's not working. Why? I partially know why. Will I try to have a fifth go at it and try again? Maybe. Will I do it right now because yet another person asked it? No. This is something me and other people are doing in their spare time so don't hold your breath. Good afternoon, Frank.

Those two old updates popped up again. I've already installed them in the past, but the yellow shield just prompted me to them again. I've tried to download the two KB and re-install them myself as well as letting the yellow shield do its thing and install them, but although it successfully completes the installation every time, it keeps popping back up at the next reboot. What's your suggestion? Uninstalling them and re-installing them again? I can't just hide them as they are marked as important... EDIT: Never mind, I just managed to hide them.

Why is the installer even using this call? It's reported as Vista and upwards inside SHELL32.dll https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/api/shlobj_core/nf-shlobj_core-shgetknownfolderpath

I implemented the workaround you told me about and I managed to get past the QuryThreadCycleTime, however, now that every call to the kernel is resolved, Shell32 argues about the SHGetKnownFolderPath function. HRESULT SHGetKnownFolderPath( REFKNOWNFOLDERID rfid, DWORD dwFlags, HANDLE hToken, PWSTR *ppszPath ); And I tried to link against my faked Shell32.dll that I put inside the folder in order to dynamically load it ('cause XP doesn't have the function), however Windows ignores my fake Shell32.dll and uses the one in System32, which of course makes the program fail to load. Anyway even when I managed to make it use my modified version of Shell32 (that was reporting the directory successfully to the caller Chrome_elf.dll), it didn't work. Well, I managed to make it load, however it was pretty much useless as the UI is broken and it didn't render any page. Note that what you are seeing in the background is my Desktop, 'cause up there there was supposed to be part of the UI, but since I've brutally commented out several parts of the UI and replaced with other code, it clearly failed to load and it showed up some pretty bad glitches when I tried to open other tabs and move the Windows. Oh, and the reduce to icon, maximize and close buttons pop up only if I move my mouse over them and they don't work if I click on them. Anyway, the very bad thing is that I can't render any page, 'cause even though the calls are fine and the engine works, I have probably screwed up somewhere when I changed how it was referencing the webkit because I had to write down some new "artistic" way to do it and I've done something wrong for sure. Debugging? Sure, except for the fact that there there is a ***** amount of lines and I have no clue where the problem lies as it compiles, the compiler (Borland) doesn't argue and the coding assistant doesn't show any red squiggly lines and the other suggestions are just bogus. I'm on my own and I don't know how to get past this point. The very same thing happens when I target Vista, except for the fact that the UI does load slightly more correctly, however I can't get pages to work correctly, so sorry Vista users, you're not gonna get a late Easter present from me. I'm not gonna keep going on with this. At least not now, as I don't have time and I don't wanna stare at the code wondering what I did wrong. As I said before, I'm a broadcast engineer, so this is not really my field of expertise and although it's a good exercise, I have many other more important things to do for my job and my academic career, so I'm not gonna spend any more time on this. I've already shared the things I've done and the compiled version with the installer on the Windows XP Forever group and if someone else there wants, I'll share the source code and everything else, but I don't think they'll have time to keep this going either. I'm sorry if I made you hope that this was going to work, but as you can see, I've done my best... literally... Good afternoon from a p***ed off FranceBB...

Is it open source? I can't find any Github/SourceForge/Codeplex project. If it's not open source, then it would have to be disassembled with IDA Pro, thus producing potentially wrong unreadable everlasting lines of code. I.e you are better off forking Chromium 69 from the official repository. That said, I don't see Chinese people willing to cooperate on open source; I mean, if you are going to make a spyware built into your browser, the last thing you wanna do as a company is to make it explicitly readable/obvious with open source code, right?

Sure it does. At least on Chromium. https://preview.web.skype.com/ (I'm using a VPN, so I've hidden the IP address). Anyway, this is what I'm using to spoof my Chromium 54 as Chromium 75: "C:\Programmi\Advanced Chrome\chrome.exe" --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/75.0.3732.0 Safari/537.36" Of course, calls don't work as the extension and the MSI fail to install. I don't know why you are all having so many issues... I've never tried it with Firefox, though, but on Chromium it has always worked flawlessly and I'm reporting my real OS: Windows XP as the last thing on earth I wanna do is to make the Win10 net market share larger.

I quote myself to give you a little update. It may look like as if we are doing nothing, but we're not. @someguy25 asked me about Chromium 74 and since I really love Chromium, we re-forked it once again and I tried to backport for the 5th time. Compiling it using v141_xp and targeting XP leads to nowhere as the new SDK does not compile, however commenting out the sandbox and some other parts of the code made it compile, however the code was unusable as 27 calls were missing (including - but not limited to - the kernel). By removing many unnecessary components and taking it to its very bone, I managed to lower the number down and by linking it to the @Dibya modified kernel we managed to get this number even lower. Right now, the only missing calls are QueryThreadCycleTime, SymGetSearchPathW, SymSetSearchPathW, SHGetKnownFolderPath, SetProcessDPIAware, however the SymGetSearch can be delayed and not loaded at start-time and SetProcessDPIAware can be faked to equal true all the time, so the only really meaningful kernel call that has to be implemented and backported is QueryThreadCycleTime, 'cause once we get that and we fake SetProcessDPIAware, we're gonna get Chromium74 open and display the UI, which would be totally positive sign. BOOL QueryThreadCycleTime( HANDLE ThreadHandle, PULONG64 CycleTime ); It refers to the realtimeapiset.h which works on Windows7 and greater only and it has two parameters: ThreadHandle, which has either the PROCESS_QUERY_INFORMATION or PROCESS_QUERY_LIMITED_INFORMATION access right and CycleTime which is the number of CPU clock cycles used by the thread and it includes cycles spent in both user mode and kernel mode. In order to avoid to try to use it, I tried to convert the Thread32 function and use the elapsed time, however I didn't manage to get positive results as it's important to know the exact clock cycles as it varies between CPUs, for instance some CPUs will vary the frequency of the timer when changing the frequency at which the CPU runs and others will leave it at a fixed rate, so asserting it will almost certainly lead to wrong results (which is what happened in my case). Unfortunately I don't have much time to dedicate at this, nor my "virtual XP colleagues" like Dibya, Samuel and Peter do as we're all very busy for a reason or another and we don't also wanna become blind by staring at "apparently meaningless" lines of code... I'm sorry that my fifth attempt to backport Chromium led to nowhere once again... Good night, Frank...

The skin is dark blue, so it's probably embedded. Unfortunately, I don't have equally good news. When I was at the reception of the building in which my office is located, I noticed that the POS connected to the computer was different. As I got closer, I noticed that the interface was completely different. While I was getting my keys and signing a document, I saw the screensaver popping up on the POS... "Blimey!" I thought, "it's Linux!". So I pretended to look at my phone and I took a picture. This is a sign that companies are moving over from XP: Apparently, old programmes are not compatible with the new Windows 10 Embedded for IoT and since programmers had to rewrite their code anyway, they just switched to Linux to avoid paying the licence and other things.

I couldn't be happier. Literally.

I spoof my Chromium 54 as Chromium 75 and it works. Just change the string at startup, like so: "chrome.exe" --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/75.0.3732.0 Safari/537.36"

You can still use GNOME Classic on Fedora, you just have to decide it when you log in, after booting. You can choose GNOME Xorg, GNOME Wayland or GNOME Classic. For the records, I don't really like the tabled/android-like feel of the "recent" version of GNOME.

I still use Chromium 54 but whenever it doesn't work, I use Firefox 52 ESR. If it doesn't work either, then I use new moon 28. I really appreciate what roytam is doing, but I'd really like to have a modified and updated version of either Chromium or Firefox, 'cause I prefer the stock versions to the forked ones. Alternatively, if he could integrate Google account sync in one of his forks it would be great.

Got it. It makes sense. So the session probably expired the other day for me, that's why I've been kicked out.

German time 7.40PM, we were having a call in a group full of Windows XP lovers with Skype 7.36 on Windows XP and after 6 minutes and 22 seconds, Microsoft kicked us out from Skype and prompted us to the "OS Not Supported" screen, preventing us to log back in again. I think this is it for XP and Skype, guys, at least if you wanna run the client natively and have calls... There's Skype Web, but you'll have to spoof your browser and it won't support calls anyway... This is yet another sign of Microsoft sticking the knife in XP... @Dibya, @someguy25.

July... it wouldn't have harmed anyone to keep it 'till the end of the year... They really look forward to get rid of NT5 and everything related to it... Hopefully, updates are gonna be stored and re-uploaded on backup servers by third party users and new, complete, final SP4 will be made... But if it was for Microsoft, everything would be gone in a matter of months...

Yes, the Italian version is definitely broken as I've never received the description of errors, but I knew that whenever I was getting "application exit with CTRL+C" in Italian, it meant that the programme I was trying to load wasn't finding some kernel calls so I had to click "ok" and give dependency walker a go, trying to find out what was missing. Ever since I modified the language to English, it started displaying error messages correctly again, though. I think that as long as it's just about error messages not correctly displayed in the Italian version, it's not a big deal, as we can find which kernel calls are missing ourselves whenever that error pops up. (Or just be a bit international and switch to English. ). By the way, black wing cat, we have a Skype group for the development of One Core API and I'd like you to join us as you are an experienced coder and you would be a valued contributor. (Add me: franceopf@gmail.com - francebb1)

They can't just get away with this and stop the support; they must fix this! I'm gonna report it to Microsoft, please do the same.

Close it with the task manager. By the way, premium, internet security and Premier versions of Avast 2018 will work as I'm using the Premier version. You can still buy it and use your licence on an old version afaik.

Because AVG has built a wide community over the years and people are not willing to change. You can say that they are the same company, you can say that the definitions are the same as well as the engine, but some people (the average user) won't listen as he doesn't know and he doesn't want to know. In other words, instead of taking the risk to picture themselves as the "evil company who bought and destroyed my favourite antivirus" they just ship Avast with an AVG UI and guess what? The average user is happy.