Windows 7 Pro on a Pentium 4 desktop? Doable?

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It's available for free and you need nothing from Windows.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_%28software%29

Wine is pre-installed on most distros; you may need to update it in some cases, though. You won't experience any significant performance losses, since it only tricks the software into thinking that it runs on a Windows computer, rather than emulating a specific set of hardware.

Edit: You may want to download Winetricks as well (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winetricks). This is needed to run some applications.

when i tried installing windows 7 on my p4 machine a few years ago everything appeared big as i couldnt get the graphics card drivers so as long as you can get all the drivers you need then uprade to windows 7

If in doubt, try running this: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download ... aspx?id=20.

No Windows disk needed, as it's not a Virtual Machine or an Emulator, WINE is a translation layer between your windows programs and the Linux kernel. What it does is translates the Windows Sytem calls of the Windows program that you might want to run in it, to UNIX/Linux system calls, and back again The UNIX/Linux system responses to Windows system responses.

Depends, I had a Dell Optiplex GX620 with a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 Hyperthreaded Processor running 7 Pro 64 But just fine. Even with just 2 GB of Ram.

However that was a newer model Pentium 4. Older model Pentium 4's might not work so well. Especially ones with IDE Hard Drives, very old Graphics Cards (Below Intel 945) and older style Ram. (Including RAMBUS, PC133 AND Pre 3200 DDR.) The Ram, Hard Disk Controller and what not will dictate the performance that Windows 7 will give. Not to mention the fact that Windows 7 may not have drivers for particular hardware.

If you have 2 GB of Ram, a SATA Hard Drive and a Windows 7 driver for the Graphic, Sound and Chipset give it a try. Won't be a speed demon but would be rather quick. Especially with not a lot of start-up programs. I would just not use AERO on that type of hardware.

Someone else mentioned Aero. What is it and how do I not use it?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Aero

If your graphics card is deemed "too weedy" by Win7 then Aero probably won't be enabled anyway - but here's how to switch it off in case it is:
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows- ... ows-vista/



Typo.

Last edited by Cornflake on 13 Apr 2014, 5:45 am, edited 1 time in total.

Just because support for XP ends doesn't mean that XP will stop working why can,t you just continue using XP?

Exactly. I've got an old XP desktop computer and use it for testing software on. It isn't connected to the internet so isn't at any risk. That machine is very old now but I'll continue to use it until the hardware eventually dies.

XP is getting less and less interesting to attack anyway, so I don't think it poses any danger to use it even when it's no longer supported.

Hmm, we'll see. Low hanging fruit and all that.

I've seen stories about how the floodgates will open now XP has been left exposed on the hillside and if exploiting Windows is supposed to be about the lulz of bringing it to its knees, it's difficult to think of anything greater than finding the, umm, one flaw to rule them all now that the recoding defences are gone. Every new vulnerability in XP is now a zero-day vulnerability.
These are possibly just speculative stories - but I can see how the opportunities might be attractive to some people.

What really ticks me off is that the UK government has paid £5.5 million to have MS extend support for the systems they've failed to upgrade, despite a few years of being warned, for an extra year.
This could create an interesting situation where MS discovers a serious vulnerability - but only provides defences against it for "selected clients".

If I was a malware coder, I'd want to make the biggest splash and target either all, or current version of MS OS's, IE, 7 through 8.1, possibly Vista as well. .

To do the first would have to find a security flaw that is common to all NT based versions of Windows. --I doubt that would be possible.

To do the latter, I would have to find security holes in current versions of Windows. Difficult to find holes that are common to these, but you could probably narrow it down further to Win7 through 8.1., or just focus on the 8 series, as this has been shipping on most new computers for almost a year and a half. --The last would be doable, and the proverbial 'stick in the eye' of Microsoft products, and a good may of it's users.

Writing malware code to affect the remaining XP users isn't going to make a very big splash.

Malware coders are like graffiti 'artists', in the fact that they want their craft to cause as much publicity as possible. Going after just XP isn't a very attractive target in that respect.

Depends on their objectives. If they are wanting to log your keystrokes and mouseclicks when logging into your online bank then Windows XP would be a very desirable target and they certainly wouldn't want any publicity. I bet organised criminals are desperately looking for an attack vector for XP and when (not if) they find one they will leverage it to their best ability. Even if only to use the computers in a bot net for hire. Some people are stuck with old XP computers and may not have the money to afford to upgrade or replace them; if these people use the computer online they may be vulnerable to these new attacks.

Most online banks (at least in Europe) won't let you login without a security token.

What's a security token? I have a bank account in France and one in England and each just requires a username and password to login.