Thanks Google: Over 10K Win XP PCs Attacked

[ravewulf]

Damn. Hit post by accident.

Anyway, you seem to have a lot of misconceptions with what Windows is actually doing.

First, Windows XP Mode IS a MS Virtual PC. The bonuses of this over your own XP image are programs launch-able to your Win7 desktop (outside of the Virtual PC Window) without starting up the full Virtual PC and you don't need to provide a license. Now having your own image of XP does have its own benefits as XP Mode is a scaled back version of XP just to run programs and do basic stuff.

Second, Vista works perfectly fine on 2 GB so long as you don't have an large amount of programs open that use a lot of it. Any less than that and it does slow to a crawl.

Superfetch only loads programs, not other data, and is a lot more sophisticated than simply loading the most recent things (that was what Windows XP's prefetcher did). Vista looks at both what programs you use most often and WHEN you are using them. Say you open a certain program every week day around 1:00. Superfetch takes note of this and loads it at that time. It dynamically adjusts based on both how much a program is used and what time of day/day of the week and any other pattern it can detect. And yes Win7 did improve on this further to make it lighter.

Third, when playing a game or any program that uses a large amount of RAM Superfetch drops whatever it is holding and gives all the RAM over to that application. This also happens if a large number of programs are open and together put a large demand on the RAM. Test this out for yourself. You can physically see how low it gets by comparing the RAM used before opening programs that use lots of memory to immediately after closing them.

Finally, the way you stated the DWM's memory usage was not clear, so I don't know if you know this or not. First all DirectX/OpenGL programs run directly on the GPU's dedicated RAM without any copy. Yes there are two copies of rastered program interfaces from programs that use GDI, but one copy is in the main RAM and the other in the GPU's dedicated memory. Win7 eliminates the copy in main RAM and exclusively uses the GPU's dedicated memory

 

[snowbat]

From the Full Disclosure report at http/seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2010/Jun/205
"Protocol handlers are a popular source of vulnerabilities, and hcp/ itself has been the target of attacks multiple times in the past. I've concluded that there's a significant possibility that attackers have studied this component, and releasing this information rapidly is in the best interest of security."

He even provides the fix - add a check for the return code of MPC::HTML::MPC::HTML::UrlUnescapeW()UrlUnescapeW() - not exactly something that needs weeks of regression testing, is it? In the open source world, this kind of thing is fixed in *hours* and updated packages are built and available on the mirrors within days.

Why so slow, Microsoft?

 

[snowbat]

[citation][nom]wotan31[/nom]Um, no, he couldn't make a fix. This is Microsoft. Proprietary and closed source. The only one who can fix it is Microsoft. Now if this were Linux, the Google engineer could indeed create a fix and offer it back to the kernel developers. Open Source > Closed Source.[/citation]
He wrote an unofficial (temporary) hotfix and released it under GPL2 or later. See http/seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2010/Jun/205

 

[eyemaster]

[citation][nom]ravewulf[/nom]Windows 7 Professional and up has Windows XP ModeThere's also using regular virtual machines on both Vista and 7http/www.microsoft.com/windows/v [...] fault.aspx[/citation]

You realize that XP mode is a complete version of XP within Win 7 and requires patching as well, right? If you use XP mode, you are not getting rid of the problem.

 

[RabidFace]

I really can't believe some of the ignorant people on this site, though it doesn't really surprise me. Though, I might be sounding arrogant.

All you people saying, "XP needs to die already", need to stop. You obviously don't know how the real world works.

Did you know a lot of banks and hospitals still use DOS based programs? Why? Because they are tried and true, and it just works. Yes, they are probably running XP, or Windows 2000, or in some cases, yes, Windows NT (FAR and few between). But when you have that many computers networked together, it's hard to transition to a new platform, and it's at a cost too.

And like the person saying his programs won't work because of his work, it's completely true. Programs are written everyday for independent companies, that will only run on that platform.

I love XP still to this day. I know everything is going to work, and all my old games are going to work. I have actually thought of building a Windows 98 machine just so I have a machine that runs DOS natively for some old games, XP doesn't run DOS natively. If I had more money, I would probably transition to Windows 7, but don't really have any need to anyway. Windows XP gets me where I need to go, and still will for some years to come. Vista on this laptop was KILLING it.

Did anyone know that Microsoft only about a year ago, stopped supporting Windows 98?