Several of the AV packages mark these as trojans. Just to be on the safe side, upload a sample to virustotal which checks with around 30 different products.
It's always good to have a second opinion - see e.g.portable clamwin
Dead wrong. Some of us (and I'm 50 this year) are discovering most of those old console games for the first time!! (Disclaimer: I've been playing games back to c.a. '77 - the original "adven" on a PDP-11 in a research lab). The nice thing is that many of them can be played as casual games so I'll go off and play a little Dragon Warrior IV (NES), Summon Night (GBA) etc. My friend's son in the shop two doors down is probably playing Mario 64 (N64) right now...
The macro recorder was a great tool for testing for leaks - especially GDI handles. Even Borland's Turbo Pascal for Windows IDE had GDI leaks (splash bitmap). Sadly missed on later versions of windows...
You could make a case for the PDP-1. See here. If you page down a little you'll see it out in a field...
For real "laptops" the Grid Compass(but not battery powered) and the DG One (which is recognizably modern looking). Great shaving mirror. The 80x25 LCD display was made up of four panels because they couldn't make a single panel large enough...
I had the pleasure of playing with both of these and many other weird pre-pc clone boxs back in the early 80's (porting UCSD p-system).
I've used the *free* AVG on hundreds of machines, many of which use WiFi. No problems on any of them. My own notebook uses Avast
(because I need a small footprint anti vir
solution - low on memory here).
Do not use Avira on any machine with a "mobile phone" internet connection - Avira does full updates, not
incremental and has a minimal 60MB memory
footprint...
Perhaps you were using the full AVG. No experience of that, but honestly I'd stick with the free solution and put spybot-sd (but not
teatimer) for non tech users.
Are you sure you haven't got that bloated lump of ordure known as Norton Internet Security pre
infected on that machine? If it is there then
grab a copy of SymNRT and remove it. (Ironically, I got burnt at around 1.am this morning with a "Fista" machine with the darned thing installed but not visible trying to connect to the internet. (The norton firewall silently blocks internet access by default)).
Hah. I regularly babysit a friends internet cafe. Have you ever seen a brand spanking new core duo machine brought to it's knees by a click happy retard? No, I bet you haven't. 50 yes 50 copies of internet exploder trying desperately to load.
All because they actually had to *switch on* an electrical appliance (a concept which seems alien to them). All because that took (gasp) around 1.5 minutes. (Including loading all the bloody messengers that the other retards - who can't see icons on the desktop need preloaded).
"This machine doesn't work" says the luser... Hmm.
The truth is that for a lot of people even flashing day glo green letters saying "Enough already, I'm doing it" written in 180 point Times Roman wouldn't be sufficient visual feedback.
Subtle doesn't work - I've lost count of the number of people who need to be *taught* the visual feedback elements present in windows.
Five seconds is too long. Seriously.
My ancient Sage II used to take around 15 seconds to boot UCSD to ramdisk...
For users with really low memory you could also use RegProt rather than TeaTimer. Oh, and don't forget to check out "Autoruns" (sysinternals) to stamp on pesky startup things.
Running on ancient (almost cretaceous) Tosh notebook with 192MB Ram, Celeron 500 - boot time for my win xp from cold a mere 45-50 seconds. (running services "lite" with almost no startup stuff).
I do something similar (Avast installed, clamwin on a memory stick as a second opinion, sysinternals process explorer as the task manager and spybot-sd (minus teatimer). RegProt as a ersatz registry settings protector. In the last resort - and I have used it a few times I upload suspect files to Hispasec's virustotal..
(But for my non tech friends machines it's usually AVG + spybot. No zonealarm because it causes more grief for non tech users especially when programs update themselves).
Looking back at my own country after 20+ years of living here in Athens, Greece I really don't recognize it any more.. Fortunately not everyone who ought to know is in favour of this hysterical over reaction - see here...
Used to work for the UK source Licensees (TDI in Bristol UK) back in the early 80's. It had it's place then as there was no such thing as a PC standard. Even so, it wasn't quite as portable as you'd think - floating point was often not IEEE and differed between implementations. Byte ordering (byte sex) mattered (even on Version IV). Performance constraints on those little machines meant that p-code had special fast "short load" instructions. The net effect was that high level programmers abused this with folklore like "the first 16 local variables are faster".
Despite that it was still in use for some business apps (mostly accountancy style stuff) right into the early 90's.
When I look at e.g. MS "Singularity" I see something suspiciously similar to my old (multi-user) Sage II (sadly now long departed).
You should get out of that basement a little more (grins). Lot's of countries use comma as the decimal seperator and dot as the thousands (e.g. Greece). Annoys the hell out of me and I've been living here 20+ years
rather than a low end netbook? At most you save about 50 euros.
With the netbook you're getting something that will run most older emulators well, and a machine which is more usable for casual net use. I run a big stack of
emulators for older consoles on an ancient Toshiba laptop (with a mere Celeron 500) with no problems. With a 1.6GHz Atom, I'd guess Project64
(N64) and ePSXe (Playstation) work well...
Anyone out there tried yet?
Really does pay off to shutdown everything except essential services. I'm running on a really old notebook (Tosh, Cel 500, 192MB Ram, XP) and it "idles" at about 140MB commit (that's with process explorer loaded). No server, workstation on manual, no spooler etc. etc. Seems to start faster than a *new* shovelware infested Vista notebook...
(The speed improvements in Firefox 3 also help, and its quite fun to compare the responsivity of my machine with a 2.6G Celeron running IE6. The answer is FF3 is *faster*!).
So I'd suggest what MS needs to do is pressure vendors to not load all that shovelware, pick more sensible defaults for the majority "home" configuration and to produce some utility to turn back on the "unneeded" services. Hey, does Mark Russinovich lurk over here at slashdot?
One of the sites to watch the growing netbook trend that I find useful is here. A few days ago they had an entry for a *really* cheap WinCE "netbook" (see here.
(Ok the price is probably if you buy 10k units, but it does look a nice cheap way of getting a CE box for development).
Many years ago (well I can date this to around 1981) P.J. Brown wrote a comment in his book "Writing Interactive Compilers and Interpreters" that you ought to offer a free beer to any user of your program who finds a bug - along with a comment that many software houses would have to buy a brewery. Seems that nothing has changed (except that Microsoft would probably need to buy this small outfit...)
...and its important to remember that what the parent post describes is nothing new - back in around 1979 Bristol University (UK) installed a
Honeywell DP68 level 2 running Multics (it burnt not only Bristol's computer budget but Bath university as well). Dual processor, SMP, and you
could split it into two separate machines or run it SMP *live*. Sigh. Fond memories of Multics. Wasted loads of time evaluating stuff for the
school of chemistry...
Slashdot Mirror
It's always good to have a second opinion - see e.g.portable clamwin
Andy
Andy
Andy
For real "laptops" the Grid Compass(but not battery powered) and the DG One (which is recognizably modern looking). Great shaving mirror. The 80x25 LCD display was made up of four panels because they couldn't make a single panel large enough...
I had the pleasure of playing with both of these and many other weird pre-pc clone boxs back in the early 80's (porting UCSD p-system).
Andy Andy
Andy
Boy, you sure are psychic - see here
Andy
Do not use Avira on any machine with a "mobile phone" internet connection - Avira does full updates, not incremental and has a minimal 60MB memory footprint...
Perhaps you were using the full AVG. No experience of that, but honestly I'd stick with the free solution and put spybot-sd (but not teatimer) for non tech users. Are you sure you haven't got that bloated lump of ordure known as Norton Internet Security pre infected on that machine? If it is there then grab a copy of SymNRT and remove it. (Ironically, I got burnt at around 1.am this morning with a "Fista" machine with the darned thing installed but not visible trying to connect to the internet. (The norton firewall silently blocks internet access by default)).
Andy
"This machine doesn't work" says the luser... Hmm. The truth is that for a lot of people even flashing day glo green letters saying "Enough already, I'm doing it" written in 180 point Times Roman wouldn't be sufficient visual feedback. Subtle doesn't work - I've lost count of the number of people who need to be *taught* the visual feedback elements present in windows.
Five seconds is too long. Seriously.
My ancient Sage II used to take around 15 seconds to boot UCSD to ramdisk...
Andy
Running on ancient (almost cretaceous) Tosh notebook with 192MB Ram, Celeron 500 - boot time for my win xp from cold a mere 45-50 seconds. (running services "lite" with almost no startup stuff).
Andy
(But for my non tech friends machines it's usually AVG + spybot. No zonealarm because it causes more grief for non tech users especially when programs update themselves).
Andy
Andy
Despite that it was still in use for some business apps (mostly accountancy style stuff) right into the early 90's.
When I look at e.g. MS "Singularity" I see something suspiciously similar to my old (multi-user) Sage II (sadly now long departed).
Andy
Andy
Downloaded final 3.0 from majorgeeks on Thursday evening (Ath, Gr).
The splash screen doesn't indicate a release candidate and help->about says its 300m9 (build 9358).
The good news is that it really does load faster (which is great for me because I'm running on a really old notebook (6 yrs old)).
Andy
Andy
Andy
Andy
With the netbook you're getting something that will run most older emulators well, and a machine which is more usable for casual net use. I run a big stack of emulators for older consoles on an ancient Toshiba laptop (with a mere Celeron 500) with no problems. With a 1.6GHz Atom, I'd guess Project64 (N64) and ePSXe (Playstation) work well... Anyone out there tried yet?
Andy
(The speed improvements in Firefox 3 also help, and its quite fun to compare the responsivity of my machine with a 2.6G Celeron running IE6. The answer is FF3 is *faster*!).
So I'd suggest what MS needs to do is pressure vendors to not load all that shovelware, pick more sensible defaults for the majority "home" configuration and to produce some utility to turn back on the "unneeded" services. Hey, does Mark Russinovich lurk over here at slashdot?
Andy
Andy
(Apparently it was originally "goddammned particle" but someone edited a manuscript...).
Andy
Andy
Andy
Andy
Andy