Linux and Windows query

Why 7? It’s massively insecure.

10 at least will have modern defender and somewhat secure.


I’d not connect to the internet on 7 at this point.

How old is your hardware? Are you not able to set the module? It’s been in everything for almost 8 years at this point. I get there is older HW out there but staying on 10 is worlds better then 7.

What about just using a win7 VM with VMware? Should be trivial if the OBD is a USB adapter. Just have to add that port to the VM.

If you want to keep your W10 installation and the reason you are not upgrading to W11 is a hardware limitation, keep in mind that it's possible to upgrade to W11 on machines that do not officially support it. I was able to update an older laptop and a desktop using the following method, which disables the hardware checks during the upgrade. I have not had any issues so far.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows11/s/LbuH6djunK

I have a dual boot Win 10 and Linux (Umbutu) Rarely use it. The Linux often needs to be online. I never want the Win 10 online. I did get one of the last physical installers for 10 at best buy. It still wants to call home to fully activate the license. It only takes a few seconds online for M$ to install all sorts of stuff on the system that turns on stuff I do not want turned on.

It gets really anoying when in the middle of a Pipe organ concert for 'Helpful hints and tips' to pop up at the most inapropriate time.

I do most of my work on the Mac, which is getting more and more annoying with lack of support for old data. When I do program it is mostly in the "printer' Scripting language Postscript. I use the ghostscript interpreter, which does not have a good windows build as it is dependent on the X windows. On the *nix kernals, one can set the terminal scroll-back buffer to many megabytes.

Lately I have been writing parsers, what can index my old disk images and compressed archives. With the newer mac OS builds working closer to the walled garden of iOS apple removed the ability to mount floppy disk images. A lot of the older hard drives just looked like large floppy disks. Ironically DOS and NTSF images still mount as do some ISO images.

One can install kernal extentions for mounting the older HFS stuff. But now that violates the security gatekeeper.

I like keeping the images, as it retains the metadata. Especially creation and modification dates and times. Modern systems really seem to much about with these. So the file sort order gets all messed up. -- edit: especially photographs, since the modern AI indexing wants to klober this with it's own metadata. --

Now that both Jobs and Warnock are dead, Apple also removed the support for 'postscript' from the preview app. So no more opening illustrator and eps documents. This all in the name of security. My impression is that Win 11 is even worse.

Now I have to use the scripts to see what the archived data is, and if it is worth getting out one of the older machines or the dual boot system to look at the files again.

Ironically I found some paper tape, what is probably close to 50 years old. I can actually hold it up and read the Hex codes without needing a reader. Sort of still need an ASCII to hex table to actually read what is punched onto the tape. Numbers are easy as are a few letters which happen a lot.

Not sure how many have over 50 years of data archived on their laptop. Or even how long such will remain readable in the near future, without having emulators and multi boot systems.

Helping others out with computers, it seems like everything now is the endless doom scroll of text, emails and social media posts. So perhaps there is not much point in using anything other than the modern walled garden interfaces and the ever present push notifications.