Items tagged with Windows 7
Microsoft seems to be having a bad run of luck with its Windows updates as of late. By now you are probably familiar with the various issues that affected the October Update for Windows 10, such as a file deletion bug that prompted Microsoft to pause the update's roll out. Well, it turns out users are seeing problems in Windows 7 as well. Image Source: Flickr via Andrew Mason Earlier this week, Microsoft issued its Patch Tuesday updates to Windows PCs, as it does on the second Tuesday of every month. Typically those go without too much trouble, and that appears to the be the case on Windows 10....
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During its Build conference last year, Microsoft bragged that Windows 10 had reached over 700 million active devices, an impressive milestone though still short of the elusive (so far) 1 billion devices goal. At the time, Windows 10 still trailed Windows 7 in terms of market share. Well, not anymore, if the latest data from an outside source is to believed. Microsoft is not in the habit of sharing monthly market share figures on its OSes, past and present, but Net Applications is, through its Net Market Share website. According to the latest tally, Windows 10 is on top with a 39.22 percent share...
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There are lots of computers out there that are still running Windows 7 even though Windows 10 has been out for a very long time and is now installed on 700 million devices globally. The reasons for staying on an old OS like Windows 7 are many and varied but some folks just feel their OS is working just fine and many end users don’t want to shell out money to replace something that isn't broken. In the enterprise realm, it can be a huge undertaking to move hundreds or thousands of PCs from one version of Windows to a new version, especially if there is proprietary software or apps that might...
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Starting in July, Microsoft's forum staff will no longer provide technical support or answers to questions for several of its products and services, including Windows 7 and Windows 8.1, one of the company's forum moderators announced. This applies to questions posted in Microsoft's Community forums. In essence, this is another move to encourage users who are getting by with legacy products to upgrade, and specifically to Windows 10. "There will be no proactive reviews, monitoring, answering or answer marking of questions. The forums will still be moderated by Microsoft agents to ensure participants...
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It looks as though Microsoft has a bit of a security issue on its hands that affects both Windows 7 and Windows 10 operating systems. Back in July 2017, Bitdefender researcher Marius Tivadar discovered an exploit in Windows operating systems that allows anyone with physical access to a computer to invoke a BSOD by simply inserting a USB thumb drive loaded with a bit of software. He reported the issue to Microsoft, but at the time they brushed him off. Now, he's stepping out with details and a demonstration to raise awareness of this vulnerability. What makes this exploit so intriguing is that Tivadar's...
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Just before the end of 2017, NVIDIA dropped a bit of a bombshell: it'd be soon dropping support for 32-bit OSes with its GeForce GPU drivers. Admittedly, such a move was inevitable, as x64 OSes have been available to mainstream audiences for at least 13 years, with Windows XP Professional x64 Edition having released on April 25, 2005. The end is now nigh, and NVIDIA has laid out all of the details on its support website. First and foremost, NVIDIA plans to drop all 32-bit GPU driver support on the GeForce side effective this month. Security releases will continue to be issued until January...
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Today is Patch Tuesday, which means that Microsoft is pushing out a slew updates for its wide portfolio of software products. First and foremost, the company is issuing another round of updates to address the Spectre and Meltdown processor vulnerabilities that rocked the computing world back at the start of 2018. Microsoft announced that it will be expanding its Meltdown mitigation solutions to x86 version of both the legacy Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 operating systems. With this latest round of updates, all of Microsoft's [currently supported] operating systems are hardened against any known Meltdown...
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The latest documents from Vault 7, a collection of confidential materials related to hacking tools used by the United States Central Intelligence Agency and obtained by WikiLeaks, was made public today by the whistle blowing organization. This newest leak details the CIA's Angelfire project, which is a persistent framework that can load and execute custom malware on computers running Windows XP and Windows 7.Angelfire consists of five components, including Solartime, Wolfcreek, Keystone (previously MagicWand), BadMFS,a nd the Windows Transitory File system. Each of these parts has a distinct job....
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It hasn’t exactly been a sterling month with regards to security for Microsoft. The company was rocked by WannaCry, a ransomware outbreak that spread across the globe. Now we’re learning of a new vulnerability that revolves around a hidden Windows metadata file called $MFT. $MFT is used by the NTFS filesystem, and resides in the root directory of Windows operating systems. Accessing it is a big no-no as far as Windows is concerned, and will result in the operating putting a permanent lock on the file. This locking behavior is exactly what happens in the case of the exploit initially discovered...
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For a quick minute, it looked as though a strain of ransomware that was seemingly stolen from the United States National Security Agency (NSA) was going to be a major problem for PCs around the world, and in particular Windows XP systems. Microsoft even made the unusual move of releasing an emergency patch for Windows XP even though it stopped supporting the legacy OS a long time ago. But now a week after the initial WannaCry outbreak it's been discovered that Windows 7 PCs were the hardest hit. A researcher for Kaspersky Lab posted a message on Twitter saying "the Windows XP count is insignificant,"...
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Many long time Windows users have not been pleased with Microsoft’s decision to block updates to Windows 7 and 8.1 for systems running current and future generations of processors. Intel’s Kaby Lake and AMD’s Ryzen chips are among the first blacklisted casualties of this policy.Microsoft deemed this necessary to improve the deployment cycle of Windows and ease the workload on hardware partners validating their products across multiple generations of Windows. Whether you buy that reasoning or not isn’t for us to decide. The fact of the matter is, Microsoft wants every one of its customers locked...
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Microsoft made headlines early last year when it announced that users of Intel Skylake (and newer) processors, would need to run Windows 10, as support would be dropped on older versions of Windows. After that initial announcement, there wasn't much additional news related to the story. That is until last fall, when Redmond's most notable company told us that it was backtracking on the idea. That was a relief to many users, but unfortunately, it was only a temporary one. It didn't take long for another issue to arise, when it was revealed that those restrictions would go into effect with Intel's...
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It might be only a matter of time before every version of Windows prior to Windows 10 barely registers a blip on the radar, but in the here and now, that is not the case. Windows 7 is still widely deployed. What's more interesting is that even though Windows 10 has been steadily growing its share of the OS market since it came out in July 2015, it has given up a bit of ground to Windows 7 over the past few months.By way of Windows users who have opted to send Microsoft telemetry data, Microsoft's own audit of Windows installs shows that Windows 10 dropped from 48 percent in December of last year...
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Late last week, news came across the wire that Khronos Group’s Vulkan API would not be supporting multi-GPU configurations on legacy operating systems like Windows 7 and Windows 8.1. This determination was made based on a slide that came from a Khronos Group presentation from GDC 2017. In the slide deck, it was stated that native multi-GPU support for AMD CrossFire and NVIDIA SLI was reliant on the Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) being set to Linked Display Adapter (LDA) mode. It was assumed that the LDA mode was exclusive to WDDM 2.0, thus making multi-GPU support available only to gamers...
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