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Windows XP is still king


Dibya

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13 hours ago, vwestlife said:

I wanted to find more info to back up this claim, and I came across this:

http://techtalk.gfi.com/2015s-mvps-the-most-vulnerable-players/

In 2015, the operating systems with the most new vulnerabilities discovered were Mac OS X, Windows Server 2012, Ubuntu Linux, Windows 8.1, and Windows Server 2008. Windows XP didn't even make the Top 15 list.

Of course, Windows XP is still a vulnerable OS -- just as anything else is -- but this disproves the myth that once official Microsoft support ended in 2014, hackers were going to go crazy discovering and exploiting new vulnerabilities in XP, and users would be seriously at risk due to Microsoft no longer patching those vulnerabilities.

I wanted to dig deeper and find the real statistics about any new XP vulnerabilities that have been discovered since support ended in April 2014, and I came up with this:

https://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/statistics-results?adv_search=true&cves=on&cpe_vendor=cpe%3a%2f%3amicrosoft&cpe_product=cpe%3a%2f%3a%3awindows_xp&pub_date_start_month=3&pub_date_start_year=2014&pub_date_end_month=11&pub_date_end_year=2016&cvss_version=3

According to the U.S. National Vulnerability Database, there were three new Windows XP Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) discovered from April to December 2014, one new CVE discovered in 2015, and none so far in 2016.

Compare that to Windows 7, which had 30 new CVEs discovered April-December 2014, 147 new CVEs in all of 2015 (no doubt thanks to Microsoft's "Get Windows 10 App" nagware), and 126 new CVEs so far in 2016.

100% agree.

I don't think hackers are interested to atack a system used by less and less people.

my AVAST anti virus has been disconnected throughout the year, I simply don't click the download button of malicious sites and I'm safe

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There has been some misunderstanding/confusion, probably my bad.

The 2.2 Tb limit is related to MBR style of partitioning. The fields in the partition table are 32 bit.

The GPT style has not this limit.

There are no issues with Server 2003 (at least SP1 if 32 bit) (or XP 64 bit) on a STORAGE ONLY device to use the GPT style of partitioning.

For 32 bit Windows XP the Paragon GPT loader (or something equivalent) is needed.

All of them cannot however be "system" disks nor "boot" disks.

Just for the record not really-really , there are (complicated) ways to boot GPT disks in BIOS through Hybrid MBRs and/or using third party bootmanagers, still the base issue remains, the NTLDR does not understand GPT.

jaclaz


 

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Well, since some sites (like Google Maps for an instance) are not giving all options to Windows XP users, I'm using masking agent with Windows XP and Firefox. So, my Internet activity adds to Windows 7 share. Im a bit curious, how many Windows XP users are masking their user agent strings. The Windows XP share could be bigger than expected, because of that.

Recently, I encountered a problem which can significantly decease the Windows XP usefulness. The world wide TLS 1.0 to TLS 1.2 migration can affect many Windows XP based activities. The simple web browsing will be ok thanks to Firefox, because it has own system independent TLS implementation. But most of the Internet based utilities use the system support for TLS.

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3 hours ago, cc333 said:

and XP handles 12 physical cores/24 logical cores perfectly (the 32 GB of RAM mostly goes to waste, but that's expected of any 32-bit OS, especially those with broken/absent PAE support).

Give it the Gavotte ramdisk (v. 1.0.4096.5, of 20081130) to throw your discardable files (Temporary Internet Files, Cookies, and other browswer's caches) as well as the pagefile into. :yes:
It takes some calisthenics, like setting UsePAE=1 and DisablePagingExecutive=1, but sure puts all that otherwise unused RAM to good use! :yes:

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3 hours ago, cc333 said:

NoelC: My Mac Pro is quite similar to your system (I'm using x5680s though, because they offer 98% of the performance at 50% of the cost of a pair of x5690s), and XP handles 12 physical cores/24 logical cores perfectly (the 32 GB of RAM mostly goes to waste, but that's expected of any 32-bit OS, especially those with broken/absent PAE support).

Windows 7 flies on it, and 8.1 is surprisingly decent, even with an old laptop drive as its boot disk (it was all I had at the time, and I didn't want to wipe any of the other 3.5" disks in my system).

c

Come on . In pae single process cannot  use more than 4gb but other process can use it.

Many times my pc goes beyond 8gb

Edited by Dibya
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16655dda20.jpg

I have started two vms , started few office apps even visual studio. Started 3dmax and Maya render. Still ram usage is low under XP.

I have started rendering some tremendous files. My pc gets out of ram and my i7 2700k crosses 100% when i render them under 8.1 or 7.

Window media player is playing a 1080P full hd game play.

Still after such harsh use my pc stayed  blazing fast

I am using a Russian skin pack to make it look like 7.

I don't  wanna  start any war here. For me XP is fast stable reliable

Edited by Dibya
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You have done much with XP.  Congratulations.  It is impressive.

A few days ago I was testing with an image that was 90,000 pixels on a side.  Not really possible with a 32 bit address space.  It illustrates why I prefer x64.  Personally I found that, while some things were slower overall (e.g., the file system), Win 8.1 didn't "get sluggish under load" as quickly as Win 7.  I've found myself craving more than 48 GB of RAM lately, though.  The more powerful the system, the bigger the jobs we tend to give it.

Though it seems like there is a "war" brewing here, I'd say it's not - it's healthy conversation and we're all learning.  What's funny is this is a thread where most or all of us agree that we're not interested in changing to Win 10 on our hardware, so has become a discussion on "how new a system can I tolerate".  :)

-Noel

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@Dibya, with all due respect: everybody and their cousin here knows you love the PAE hack. Notice it was unveiled by Geoff Chappell a long time ago, and it works beautifully for Vista+ and 2k. XP and XP SP1 don't need it, nor do the x86 Server NT OSes. However, no matter how strongly you may wish to the contrary, it's unstable for XP SP2 and SP3, and none of the patches available does anything to restore to the hal the code extricated from it by MS, which results in unfixable instabilities, only part of which are solved - somewhat - by using a bunch of Server 2k3 drivers.


OTOH, the Gavotte Rramdisk is free, safe, *stable*, reasonably easy to set up, and just works! It goes without saying that it doess not hamper the attainment of multimonth uptimes.

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7 hours ago, dencorso said:

@Dibya, with all due respect: everybody and their cousin here knows you love the PAE hack. Notice it was unveiled by Geoff Chappell a long time ago, and it works beautifully for Vista+ and 2k. XP and XP SP1 don't need it, nor do the x86 Server NT OSes. However, no matter how strongly you may wish to the contrary, it's unstable for XP SP2 and SP3, and none of the patches available does anything to restore to the hal the code extrincated from it by MS, which results in unfixable instabilities, only part of which are solved - somewhat - by using a bunch of Server 2k3 drivers.


OTOH, the Gavotte Rramdisk is free, safe, *stable*, reasonably easy to set up, and just works! It goes without saying that it doess not hamper the attainment of multimonth uptimes.

I  rename sp1 halamacpi to hal64.dll then copy to system32

I patch required kernel then rename k64.exe then copy to system32

Then i put following switches /kernel=k64.dll /hal=hal64.dll/PAE

Sp2/sp3 hals are unstable but sp1 hal is super stable. Previously patched sp3 hal started causing problems with my many devices those vanished with sp1 hals.

Dencorso surely i truely love pae

Edited by Dibya
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So you solved it by falling back to the SP1 hal (and that's the halmacpi [= ACPI 1.0 / APIC / MP] variant, of course!). Good to know it still works OK with much later versions of all the rest of the system core files and the appropriate patched kernel. :yes:

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Doesn't the SP2/SP3 hal have important security patches and such?

But, if it works, why bother with security :) ?

I should give that another try (I think I tried it on my Mac Pro earlier this year, and it made things too unstable; perhaps it was because I did something wrong?)

c

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37 minutes ago, vinifera said:

mmm if XP was recompiled with proper x64 support
with added DWM and win7's taskbar
-

I'd ditch any other NT in its favor

Doesn't DWM rely on Windows Vista's and over WDDM :dubbio:? Backporting it would be a pain in rear, I would imagine...

Edited by greenhillmaniac
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4 hours ago, vinifera said:

mmm if XP was recompiled with proper x64 support
with added DWM and win7's taskbar
-

I'd ditch any other NT in its favor

Really? One guy name of Samuka of Betaarchive forum is trying to do it.

May be next year you will have your dream xp.

3 hours ago, greenhillmaniac said:

Doesn't DWM rely on Windows Vista's and over WDDM :dubbio:? Backporting it would be a pain in rear, I would imagine...

Absolutely! It's a vista and up exclusive 3d and skinning technology.

11 hours ago, dencorso said:

So you solved it by falling back to the SP1 hal (and that's the halmacpi [= ACPI 1.0 / APIC / MP] variant, of course!). Good to know it still works OK with much later versions of all the rest of the system core files and the appropriate patched kernel. :yes:

I did so my friend because pos updates replacing kernels so its a pain to patch everytime . so i did so .

Sp1 hals are working perfectly. I have not faced any problem. System is ultra stable.

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