Computer Question: Security, Windows XP vs Windows 7 Ultimate

July 5, 2011

[Yosemitest]

I'm thinking about buying an IMac, and due to my military friends and other reasons,
I might want a copy of Windows XP or Windows 7 on it with Parallels Desktop 6 for Mac
to go between the Windows Operating System and the Snow Leopard or OS X Lion .

I realize that the Apple/Mac Operating System has very few security problems, and that I'd be inviting all those security problems into my MAC by running windows in it.


QUESTION: Is Windows 7 Ultimate worth the extra cost to buy a full version copy, over Windows XP SP3 full version?
I'm experienced with Windows XP, but I'm NOT experienced with Windows 7.

Also, if I'm going to run Windows XP or Windows 7 in an IMac, what firewall/security system should I buy?

Sincerely, Yosemitest

[Turbopilot]

What, specifically, do you want to do in XP or Windows 7 that you feel you can’t or don’t want to do within OS X? Without that info, any recommendation is incomplete and potentially unhelpful.

[PastorBooks]

“What’s the security like under UBUNTU or KUBUNTU?
Since it’s an open system, isn’t it very acceptable to all sorts of malware? “
^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Rock solid, and no real viruses to speak of. That doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen, but there isn’t much reason for virus writers to write for Linux. Linux distributions, especially the Debian-based systems like Ubuntu and Linux Mint are auto-updating. The systems are automatically updated daily behind the scenes and so vulnerabilities are fixed quickly.

Linux was designed to be more secure from the start; Windows was written for home users in the pre-internet era. Computer security for early Windows programmers was to keep the door locked. Linux was crafted after the Unix/BSD tradition, used for corporate mainframes where security was an issue.

Mac OSX is based on BSD, so Linux and OSX are cousins in a way.

I’ve run Linux for the past five years — Kubuntu, Ubuntu and next will be going with Linux Mint. Not one virus.

Linux is very stable and you have a literal ton of free programs to choose from, most found in the repository of your distribution. If you want a program you choose it on a list, click OK and it will auto-install.

Games are another issue. If you’re into games on the side, you’ll need to dual-boot into Windows. Same goes for any proprietary program you can’t do without, but for the most part Linux has an alternative package that will do just as well.

Check out Linux Mint and Ubuntu — both are Debian-based and can update software easily.

Some Linux Alternatives
* may not be as powerful in some cases, but don’t cost $hundreds.

MS Office => LibreOffice, OpenOffice
Photoshop => Gimp, Krita
Adobe Illustrator => Inkscape
Adobe Indesign => Scribus
Media players => huge number, too great to even list
DVD players => Kaffeine, and many more
Freemind Mind Mapper
Firefox
Google Chrome => Chromium
Geany — awesome light text editor

And hundreds of others

[Oceander]

Rest is always best. Again, based on what you’ve said, definitely go for the MAC, and quite frankly, if everyone you work with who has a PC prefers XP, then I’d say go with XP if - and that’s the crucial part - you have a good virtual machine. With a good virtual machine, you probably won’t get more than the average amount of attacks that would hit a regular XP install, and you almost certainly won’t get any spillover into your native MAC installation.

Also, just one little point of clarification on the driver shim: it’s not a matter of similarly spelled drivers, but rather of inserting a new driver between two existing drivers in the logical flow of information; Microsoft itself does this routinely with a lot of the diagnostic stuff, for example. A good example is Microsoft’s Network Monitor, which shims drivers into the network stack so that it can intercept and display IP packets going to and from your network card.

Think of it this way: App1 has to be able to “talk” to the screen, I’ll call it Screen1, to display information. To do that, App1’s information has to be translated into a form that the screen hardware will accept and display as an ordered set of LCD pixels. To make that translation, there is a driver, call it ScreenDriver, that sits between the two, so schematically it looks like:

App1 —> ScreenDriver —> Screen1

Now, App1 doesn’t know anything about the internal workings of Screen1; all it knows is that it spits out the ASCII line “hello world” and Screen1 then flips LCD pixels so that the lighted pixels arrange themselves to show that same phrase in lighted pixels.

It’s sort of as if App1 only spoke Russian, and Screen1 only spoke Mandarin: ScreenDriver is bilingual and speaks both.

Now, say that Hacker comes along and - for whatever reason - wants to intercept that traffic and reverse every sentence. To do that, Hacker can simply insert a new driver either between App1 and ScreenDriver, or between ScreenDriver and Screen1 - call it HackerDriver.

One configuration would be as follows:

App1 —> ScreenDriver —> HackerDriver —> Screen1

HackerDriver would need to speak Mandarin and Russian, even though it sits between two Mandarin speakers. It would work most simply by taking data from ScreenDriver, reverse engineering it so that it could figure out what Russian sentence the Mandarin it got from ScreenDriver was supposed to be, altering that Russian sentence, and then retranslating it into Mandarin before sending it off to Screen1.

Screen1, not knowing the original Russian that App1 sent - by definition - would happily display the altered sentence “dlrow olleh” and would send back an “OK” signal to confirm that it received the data - in Mandarin - and was able to display it. HackerDriver would then pass that confirmation back to ScreenDriver - after filtering it first to make sure that Screen1 wasn’t trying to pass back a digest or some other tell-tale of the actual data that was displayed (that would be an audit trail of a sort).

ScreenDriver would receive the “OK” signal from, to all intents and purposes, Screen1, and would in turn confirm back to App1 that the data was properly received and displayed.

Nonetheless, the user would immediately see that something funny was going on between his fingers hitting the keyboard and what was being displayed on the screen.

Of course, in the meantime, HackerDriver could be doing other nasty stuff because a lot of drivers are actually allowed to execute portions of their code within the so-called kernal-space of the OS - the protected inner sanctum.

[antiRepublicrat]

Security has been completely overhauled and refactored for Win7. For example, let’s say in XP that you want to open the clock to watch the seconds tick to time something. That requires higher privileges because the same panel that shows the clock also allows you to set the time. Now showing the clock and setting time are split permissions-wise. This has been done in hundreds of places throughout Win7.

So before where you needed to run as admin to get anything done, you can now easily run as a regular user. That right there gives you much better security. It also vastly reduces the annoying security popups, meaning you are less likely to turn off that feature (Win7 also adds registry virtualization to further reduce it for legacy apps).

Furthermore, they refactored the code itself, making sure everything is relatively cleanly dependent on something lower down, where before it was a spiderweb of dependencies, down, sideways and up, and that hurts security. That directly impacts the security, and a cleaner, saner dependency model makes for better security.

Now that’s just basic architecture changes that make it more secure, not any specific technologies they used to do it, like address space layout randomization.

[Tainan]

Nice. That way the viruses com pre-installed.

No Johnny...they do not. Sorry for your mis-preception.

If you are unwilling or unable to afford to buy a legal copy of your operating system,

Neither of which is applicable in my case. I have 3 valid XP Pro licenses on my machine. Again, sorry.

Windows from some random download site, there is the fact that this is is stealing.

Again, 3rd time, sorry Johnny...XP is, and has been for a year or so, available and fully supported by MS from DL on the web.

Nice that you're a Linux fanboi, nothing against them. I have a free Linnux disc setting on my desk. Ubuntu 8.04.1 LTS...screwed up my entire computer and I had to re-format the entire Hard Drive when I tried to install it.
I'm just not geeky enough....and don't want to be. I use my computers...I don't like them to use me.

[2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten]

Supposedly (triple underline that word in this context) there is a way to call MS and explain to them that you’re not installing on a new machine - it’s just that you’ve modified your existing machine and (again supposedly) they are supposed to be able to give you what is in effect, a variance or a waiver.

However there is theory and there is practice. This may not always work. At some point they might just say “no mas”.

[Johnny B.]

XP is, and has been for a year or so, available and fully supported by MS from DL on the web.

I have had subscriptions to MSDN, so I know about being able to download software from Microsoft. However, that is certainly not free.

If Microsoft is providing free, legal downloadable copies of WinXP and/or Win7, please be so kind as to provide a link. I would find that very useful.

[2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten]

I too would be glad to see Linux become the standard platform but it ain’t happened yet - so basically Windows is a necessary “evil” - unless you’re a mac head which I’m not.

I’m old enough to remember OS2 but I only became a geek late in life so I never actually used it. They say it was damned good though. IBM has a whole slew of woulda/shoulda/coulda’s - OS2 being only one of them.

[tubebender]

Did anyone ping swordmaker...

[Robe]

Not to mention the fact that MS is likely to be able to detect this sort of piracy and lock you out from using the illegal product..................

This is the situation I in now....I was using a Gateway system with XP..for 5 years or so. In the past weeks I was hit a few times but Trend Micro seemed to do it’s thing.
However the Computer was slow to boot and had a couple of crashes.
I put a machine together from Tiger Direct motherboard/cpu combo,and all new devices.
I loaded XP and at activation, got the old “Product Key invalid thing. I called Microsoft, they told me that the Gateway XP op sys was on the internet, and they wouldn’t give me a new key.
So now I’m stuck.. gonna have to go buy W7

The version of my lagitemit XP an OEM from Gateway

[discostu]

If the hardware can handle it 7 is a great OS. People who fled from it either put it on machines that weren’t up to snuff, or are just whiners. It’s fast, it’s stable, the search function kicks butt. Not to mention that it’s NOT 10 years old, XP is about a block and a half away from the ash-heap of history.

[discostu]

All my old stuff worked fine on 7. The compatibility jump is a real “your mileage may vary” situation. It all depends on how well the vendor was keeping up. I did a dual boot when I set mine up, expecting problems, I booted to XP twice in the 18 months since I made the jump.

[discostu]

If you need to scrub your machine frequently why not use ghost? It’s free on a hirens, save an image of your clean install, do your dirty work, and scrub. Faster than re-installing and doesn’t use up your licenses. I wouldn’t even try to run my test lab without ghost.

[discostu]

Those messages aren’t Window’s fault. That’s the makers of your software doing a crappy job writing their code and Windows detecting it slightly before the crappy code crashes.

[Johnny B.]

If you need to scrub your machine frequently why not use ghost?

I have used Ghost, although I typically just book a Linux live CD and use that.

Actually, since about 2003, I've mainly used VMs, which allow me to recover in a few seconds.

I know that I can call up their support line and get a new activation number. But it annoys me that Microsoft assumes that I'm a thief.

[roamer_1]

I've heard that from alot of my military friends, and with my basic knowledge of XP, I'm really leaning towards buying the XP SP3 full version for about $60.00. I just wanted to know if the Windows 7 Ultimate had a more secure operating system, that was less susceptible to MBR Rootkits, malware, viruses, and other nasty problems.

For the extra 40 bucks, A Win7/64 Home will probably do all you want it to. And it is the 64bit (if you're box can handle it) that make Vista/Seven so superior to XP (whose 64bit version was always hinky.) But even the 32bit Seven is preferable to XP... If not for the eye-candy and superior graphics, even if only for the repairs to known exploits it is worth the upgrade. But it is 64bit that you should be shooting for - It is 64bit that allows you to access ALL of the computing power possible in modern processors, and that gives you an ability to manage enormous quantities of RAM memory (32bit systems can only handle 3g).

As far as security is concerned, I would say that Seven is a bit better than XP - Again, many known exploits in XP era subsystems has been tightened up in Vista/Seven. UAC provides a basic block to older viruses (albeit that newer viruses go right through it), and the Win7 firewall is more manageable.

[conservativeimage]

The xp emulator cost me $100 because I had to upgrade from 7 home to professional and I already said that the emulator only operates in 16 bits color and lags so badly - like 3 frames per second - that it was just a waste of money and time. TY

[tacticalogic]

I’m running it at home, and it seems to work fine. I’m running 4*3GHz cores and 8GB of ram.

[conservativeimage]

The software codes load and operate beautifully on xp. Microsoft simply did a profiteering scheme by refusing to make the 7 system compatible with xp requiring you to spend even more money on expensive new software that is compatible. I learned this first hand when I paid over $150 for a new version of an application that said it was 7 compatible. The new version had not been fully tested and during installation it asked if I wanted to participate in a debugging program to help improve the software! They want you to do the work they didn’t do when they rushed off their product before it was ready and they don’t pay you for your time solving their dysfunctional applications. I have logged over eight instances how the new version of this software is less functional than the xp version and came to the ultimate conclusion that NOTHING NEW EVER WORKS. TY.

[conservativeimage]

4*3GHz cores and 8GB of ram.

Are you saying that my 2.2GHz cores and 3GB ram aren't fast enough for 7 pro, because ms says that I only need 1GHz and 2BG. Do you think I need to $$$upgrade$$$?