Nobody likes Windows 12

[Essence Lumin]

Fond memories of finagling with GRUB after a WinXP update decided the boot sector is "corrupted".

Or Lilo!

 

[Essence Lumin]

It may be worth noting that many (most?) computers have two bios passwords, one to change the bios and one to continue booting. I doubt Windows can bypass the latter, though I haven't tried it.

 

[Cindy Claveau]

Most people also don't usually worry about the level of their anti-virus security. I just got spammed by McAfee AV, which I would NEVER use in any known universe. The ad came from a stupid search popup so I can't blame Microsoft, but overall while still setting up this PC, I've experienced more derails, useless side trips and nonsensical recommendations than I want. I don't use Windows Security (a contradiction), I prefer Bitdefender. But I have to fight to defend my choices on MY desktop. Bastards.

Sure, most people never worry about virus protection - that's what Bitdefender and Windows AV are supposed to do. But FFS, once I choose do NOT bug me any more, and for godsake never offer me McAfee!! McAfee itself is a virus.

Edit: it's been about 15 minutes now and no more McAfee after I rebooted. What kind of self-respecting virus doesn't reinstall itself on reboot?

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

The whole anti-virus industry is massively corrupt. The only kind-of-in-the-wild virus for PalmOS (Phage, which required you to deliberately IR beam the file to another device which took holding your handhelds together for over a minute) was created by them, and then they added scans for it in their Windows antivirus ware, and that led to several cases of data loss for my users and me trying to help them recover. I hate them with the burning fire of a thousand suns.

 

[Cindy Claveau]

The whole anti-virus industry is massively corrupt. The only kind-of-in-the-wild virus for PalmOS (Phage, which required you to deliberately IR beam the file to another device which took holding your handhelds together for over a minute) was created by them, and then they added scans for it in their Windows antivirus ware, and that led to several cases of data loss for my users and me trying to help them recover. I hate them with the burning fire of a thousand suns.

The only thing I want from my AV is to stop infections that harm or steal data. What I don't want is to be over saturated with password checks, image tests and other miscellaneous crap that's not pertinent to what I'm doing. I've been setting up PCs since the early 90s. What I just endured just to ALMOST get Win11 tamed for my purposes should be banned by the Geneva Convention.

 

[Imnotgoing Sideways]

The only thing I want from my AV is to stop infections that harm or steal data. What I don't want is to be over saturated with password checks, image tests and other miscellaneous crap that's not pertinent to what I'm doing. I've been setting up PCs since the early 90s. What I just endured just to ALMOST get Win11 tamed for my purposes should be banned by the Geneva Convention.

AV is a second line of defense. Think twice about relying on it to 'protect' your computer.

 

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

It's trojans that scare me the most, not viruses. In fact, the one time I've had an infected Windows machine was a trojan on WinXP, the first machine I ever ran SL on. Somehow the trojan managed to get past whatever protection I had installed to install itself...but got locked down and disabled before it could do anything. A close call.

I don't currently run AV on my Linux box, though if I shared files with Windows machines on a regular basis, I'd probably manually run ClamAv on anything suspicious.

 

[Noodles]

Worst virus experience I have had was at my old job where I was working IT for a small office. It kept coming back and coming back. Finally once night my boss and I worked overnight while everyone was gone, as had to shutdown all the PCs. Then, one by one disinfect them and reconmect them, because it kept spreading around the neetwork.

Probably the second worst, same job, the big boss's daughter had a laptop he wanted us to look at, because we got to also be his personal IT sometimes. I brought it in, and the moment it was connect to the network it started blasting out soam apparently and Comcast blacklisted out office from the internet.

That was fun.

 

[Imnotgoing Sideways]

My fondest virus memory was when an Email went around my office with an attachment of [some famous actress]naked.jpg.exe. Practically took the company's IT infrastructure down for a couple days.

I was on the short list of people who knew not to open unsolicited attachments. =^-^=

 

[Essence Lumin]

We had a few hundred pcs at my network. My biggest memory of some sort of malware was in the '90s and our network slowed to a crawl. After a few hours of investigating it was due to a flood of packets from someone's desktop. I unplugged the network cable to try and investigate further. That fixed the problem but me being a programmer and not familiar with such things never did figure out any more about what happened. PC reformatted and that was that.

 

[Free]

PC reformatted and that was that.

Sometimes tossing the baby out with the bathwater is the best solution.

 

[Cindy Claveau]

My best friend was going through a nasty divorce and her ex-to-be was some kind of self-styled IT expert. She complained that her PC started running slow, or running late at night. I looked at it and discovered that her ex had written a couple of batch files (Batch files!) that copied all of her messages to his server any time she sent new ones. It was pretty simple to delete his crap and password protect her machine. He was NOT happy. Bwahaha.

 

[Beebo Brink]

I still get sick to my stomach remembering the Ransomware virus that encrypted all the documents on Mrs. Beebo's hard drive AND on the attached external hard drive we used for archiving. Since she used the computer only occasionally, we didn't even know what happened until long past the deadline for getting her content back. She would have paid the ransom, assuming we could figure out how to get ahold of bitcoins (this was at least 15 years ago), but we didn't have that option.

She lost years worth of genealogy research. Eventually, I found another archive tucked away on a separate ext. hard drive that I hadn't used in a few years. So she recovered some of what was corrupted, but by that time she was too emotionally exhausted to care. She never really pursued that hobby with the same enthusiasm after that.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

I still get sick to my stomach remembering the Ransomware virus that encrypted all the documents on Mrs. Beebo's hard drive AND on the attached external hard drive we used for archiving. Since she used the computer only occasionally, we didn't even know what happened until long past the deadline for getting her content back. She would have paid the ransom, assuming we could figure out how to get ahold of bitcoins (this was at least 15 years ago), but we didn't have that option.

She lost years worth of genealogy research. Eventually, I found another archive tucked away on a separate ext. hard drive that I hadn't used in a few years. So she recovered some of what was corrupted, but by that time she was too emotionally exhausted to care. She never really pursued that hobby with the same enthusiasm after that.

A few years ago when I was just getting into learning Blender, I had an SSD failure. All of the projects I had finished up to that point, and two projects I was right in the middle of - and pretty far along in - were just gone. One of those projects was a realistic human character for an online course I was taking and it was a LOT of work. It took me over a year to regain enough motivation to even start learning 3D again.

Also I back up ALL of my projects on OneDrive now.

 

[Noodles]

Also I back up ALL of my projects on OneDrive now.

Yeah, after losing a bunch of family photos (like a decade ago) to a drive failure, Inuse the cloud (currently OneDrive) for back ups. The NAS is a mirrored RAId and it pushes everything online to a seperate One Drive account just for the backups (family plan gives 6TB across 6 accounts.)

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

I have stuff on Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, Box.com, and Asus Webstorage. Also every time a Time Machine volume fills up I buy a new drive and put the old one on the shelf. I do miss cheap magtape though.

 

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

Sometimes tossing the baby out with the bathwater is the best solution.

The Dust off and niuke the machine from orbit solution. It's the only way to be sure.

 

[Monica Dream]

These days it's basically a thin wrapper around a VM and dodgier than ever.

Naw, I used interix; it was garbage ..on a par with Cygwin.
WSL1 is an actual subsystem (meaning a part of windows) and worked pretty well. WSL2 is essentially a built-in hyper-v VM which works better/smoother than using something like virtualbox or vmware.

I can see the day coming when MS pushes the OS-as-a-subscription scam hard enough to drive me back to Linux and its' flake-ass graphic drivers; but today is not that day.

A few years ago when I was just getting into learning Blender, I had an SSD failure. All of the projects I had finished up to that point, and two projects I was right in the middle of - and pretty far along in - were just gone. One of those projects was a realistic human character for an online course I was taking and it was a LOT of work. It took me over a year to regain enough motivation to even start learning 3D again.

Also I back up ALL of my projects on OneDrive now.

I've got, like, a couple hundred gb of opensim stuff on onedrive for similar reasons.

 

[Monica Dream]

Or Lilo!

Holy fuck, that's one thing I don't miss like at ALL.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

Naw, I used interix; it was garbage ..on a par with Cygwin.

Interix was an enhanced version of the POSIX subsystem and definitely ran more UNIX stuff without a porting effort than Cygwin or the MKS toolkit.

Microsoft bought Interix because it was too embarrassing to still be running Hotmail on FreeBSD and SunOS after two tries at converting it to Windows and failing.

And it took me too many tries to get WSL2 running on a laptop that didn't have virtualization enabled in the BIOS when I started, including two dives into Google to find out how to turn on Windows features that the WSL2 installer should have turned on for me or at least told me I needed to turn them on. It's less like part of Windows and more like a Docker container.