This may work for you, but my advice for the average user is to please not do this.
If you come over to my house, I’m not sharing my wifi password with you.
Do you have some kind of anti virus software and firewall software.
In the 90s a lot people use to use zone alarm I don’t know if it is any good today or not.
I use the Windows default firewall and the free version of Panda Dome as my antivirus/antimalware.
I thought I was pretty clear.
You aren’t suggesting that others do as you have. I’m explicitly saying that others should NOT do as you have.
You may know exactly what you are doing, but in thirty five years in this business and I have seen end users click on the dumbest links…
I hear ya! But IMHO, clicking on questionable links isn’t really about the version of Windows one is using or whether that version is being updated or not. Clicking on questionable links using any version of Windows increases the possiblity of intection and/or exploitation.
Back up files you want on a regular basis.
It has been a long time since I used Win7, but IIRC there is some kind of backup that allows you to reinstall including all of your files and settings.
If you do get some nasty intrusion or virus, just nuke the whole thing and reinstall.
Oh, and do NOT use the machine for any on-line activity that needs a password or where you share credit card info like e-commerce. For example, don’t even check a bank statement on line, because that requires you to log in.
I mean, if you do anything using Windows 7, you’re guaranteed to have malware on your machine. I think the last version of Windows to not have ransomware built in was, what, XP?
How would you go about how to secure a windows 7 computer?
Does avast free edition have real time protection?
Exactly. I have tens of thousands of dollas of software installed, configured and working properly. Along with many hardware/IO devices.
Can you 100.0% guarantee me that they will all work as currently? Hint: each time someone has made this claim in the past, they have been proven wrong.
And, how much of my time is it going to WASTE trying toget back to where I am, already? (who pays me for that?)
Or, take an image of it after everything has been installed – OS, updates, drivers, applications – and configured. I do all of this offline – having previously downloaded all drivers and updates so the machine doesn’t yet need internet access to complete this task.
Put that on a different disk (or, a hidden partition) so you can return to exactly this state at a later date – without going through the slow reinstallation process, downloading all those updates and drivers, rebooting 15 times along the way – and THEN installing all of your applications (with updates) so you can eventually configure everything to your preferences.
[A base W7 install imaged with drivers and updates takes just 5 or 6 minutes to reinstall. If you replace the original drive with a larger drive, it’s the same 5-6 minnutes plus an additional step of “expanding” the drive’s partition (in Disk Manager).]
Clonezilla makes this relatively painless for novices.
Well… I’ve been building PCs since 1989, I’ve got a computer science degree and a MS in MIS, and I’ve worked in fairly large company corporate IT shops since 1997. So it’s not a knee-jerk reaction, so much as a pretty well-considered opinion.
I wouldn’t fool around with Windows 7 in2024 if I could avoid it. The main thing you have going for you isn’t your own technical savvy, it’s security through obscurity and just plain luck.
That’s not true – unless you are refering to W7 itself!
This machine has W7 and has been in operation, in this configuration, since 7 June 2017.
Every 6 months I remove the disk drive and set it on a shelf. I take the disk drive from 6 months prior, install it and run the latest free AVs. So, the AVs have had 6 months to catch anything that has come along since that drive was taken out of service. I then remove the AVs (by reinstalling a copy of an image of that drive before the AVs were installed) so they don’t impact performance or opt to update themselves.
I’ve never found anything, suggesting the combination of NAT at my ISP, NAT in my router and “best practices” has kept everything off of the computer. Note that all of the passwords for the various email and website accounts are “remembered” in Firefox yet none of those appear to have ever been compromised.
In another 6 months, I will take the recently removed disk and repeat the test with it.
Granted, it is too late to offer any “live” protection. But, it builds confidence that our configuration and usage have been “safe”. If it hasn’t, then the possibility that my email accounts/address book may have been compromised exists. Someone would tell me if they started receiving odd emails/solicitations from me.
I know several friends who run real-time AV products who can’t make the same claim.
Because they broke the shit out of Windows when they went to Win10. Ever since Win 3.1 the keyboard shortcut keys were the same; they broke that with Win10. Whomever came up with that @#$%& ribbon should be waterboarded, burned alive, shot, drawn & quartered…& then tortured!
Anyone here use a script blocker to keep away third party code?
Sone one was saying I should use script blocker to keep away third party code? I believe it some Firefox edition.
My only guess is bad script on the website they are making reference to here.
My server runs MS-Windows 7 (and a CPU from 2011). It has limited Internet access.
I just ran Malware Bytes on it. Nothing funny on it, as usual.
If you are careful, you can be reasonably safe. Problem is, most people don’t have the expertise to understand what careful is.
Just because something is “old” doesn’t mean it can’t be useful.
One real possibility is some poorly written mission required software that there is no vendor to update it any more.
My brother has a situation where he has some accounting software that has to run on XP. The reason it won’t run in XP mode or on an emulator is that it calls undocumented functions in libraries in an attempt at optimization.
I’ve built him a couple of VMs with no internet access to use until he can get the data migrated to newer programs.
Tens of thousands of dollars of software? But no money to afford an up-to-date computer and operating system?
Plenty of good suggestions in this thread.
There’s only so much you can do as the cybersecurity threats have advanced in the decade-plus since Win7 went out of mainstream support. If you’re indexing on being secure, always run the latest and greatest.
You may not be able to stop invaders at the moat, but you can make sure there is nothing they can steal and use. Again, be able to restore all your stuff, avoid going on line, and certainly don’t ever do anything on line with a password or credit card.
Money is no object. What IS important is the TIME required to reinstall AND RELICENSE all of that software – assuming that such an effort doesn’t FORCE an upgrade in any of those applications (do you want to discover a whole new set of “issues”/bugs in a new OS AND all of the applications that you have running on it, just to say you are running the latest version of a particular OS?) or discover some incompatiblities with the new OS that render your previous purchases unusable.
[I still lament losing After Dark – though it was not “productivity software”]
What does that new OS give you THAT YOU HAVE FELT HELPLESS TO HAVE LIVED WITHOUT for all this time?
Perhaps your time is free so spending weeks or months of “unproductive time” just trying to get your tools back to the level of functionality THAT THEY WERE ALREADY IN is a good way for you to spend your life. For me, throwing my time at a task that offers no real reward is just plain silly.
I (and YOU!) can buy a new car (literally) every week. If I want to spend my time looking at new cars and selling off last week’s purchase. Gee, what value, that?