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The “legacy” vs “UEFI” boot setting is hardware-dependent. (And on a lot of systems, also firmware / BIOS version dependent.) And it’s not even just “works” vs “doesn’t work” – on some systems it’s “works differently” down to the hardware level. (Anything with a Thunderbolt connector, for example)

Short version: On new hardware you probably want to use UEFI mode, on old hardware you probably want to use legacy mode – but some models will differ.

See also https://github.com/pbatard/rufus/wiki/FAQ#Why_doesnt_Rufus_create_a_Windows_installation_USB_that_can_be_booted_in_dual_BIOSUEFI_mode

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Cee Arr

Oh, and on a more detailed reading, it seems that Windows 10 Enterprise might not have quite good enough with default settings either – what was tested was the Dutch government desktop setup.

Therefore any differences between W10 Enterprise and Pro, or even Home, certainly would’ve been outside the scope of that particular assessment.

Well. Guess this should answer some questions…
https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/3066418/microsofts-office-data-telemetry-breaches-gdpr

Microsoft seems to be collecting subject lines from emails and full sentences that are run through a spelling and grammar checker or the translation tool

So… Windows 10 might have but Office certainly didn’t pass muster. Microsoft might have a little problem here.

I’m sure they’ll find it easier, technically, to issue an update to stop automatic telemetry collection than to provide the required documentation for data already gathered… but they’re still required to do the latter as well, anyway.

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Elly

Well, that could help. However, we’re by no means done with this category of vulnerability, nor do I expect any time soon…

 

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/14/spectre_meltdown_variants/

The chip vendors’ insistence that they’re not affected contradicts the researchers’ published statements. “Even with all mitigations enabled, we were still able to execute Meltdown-BR, Meltdown-PK, and Meltdown-RW,” they state in their paper, adding that “some transient execution attacks are not successfully mitigated by the rolled out patches and others are not mitigated because they have been overlooked.”

And then there was the one about GPU-based side channel attacks, where did I put that one again…

… actually it appears to be one of the few ways to make Sharepoint Online do what people want – as in appear as a network share without syncing everything to local disk.

Yes, it’s in many ways less than optimal and even has dependencies on IE when you do that, unfortunately. Still, no local disk space usage and much less of a file version / sync race hazard, as well as ability to open file directly instead of manual download/edit/upload (which seems to be too complicated for many end users).

One thing about exact bit-for-bit drive copies… DON’T put the copy and original back in the same system before changing the drive id numbers. (Smarter disk cloning software may manage this automatically but then it’s no longer a bit-for-bit copy…)

Windows will often mess it up if it finds the same id on two different NTFS drives. As in, it does the same thing every time and it’s usually not the “right” thing to do.

It’ll probably boot up and run… until something happens and it no longer does, like the old drive breaks a bit or just gets slower, or you install an update that changes drive enumeration order, or something.

Well. Microsoft’s Office 365 cloud offering is not actually all that hopeless even without Windows client systems. They could just switch to selling that for Mac and Linux users. What little of client functionality remains unimplemented there today, should be fairly minor to get fixed (except for MS Access, which apparently isn’t portable).

BUT… I’m seeing what looks like similar issues with quality control and update management on 365 too, both the applications and the backend.

Recommending Windows directly as an operating system for the desktop is something I haven’t been doing since… well, 1995? It’s always “What do you need to run on it and do you need to have it officially supported by a specific vendor?” which does depressingly often still end up meaning Windows. Server side… well, there was a long gap between HP AS/UX being discontinued and Samba becoming good enough.

Not to mention the major brand high-availability datacenter servers and storage systems where disks were mounted vertically… could name several models from NetApp and HP that I’ve personally used that were like that.

Though not all disk models were certified for use in those.

… btw, which VM system are you using?

Because, there’s supposed to be a working “balloon memory” driver for Windows guests on qemu/kvm, which might in some situations help with running two VMs simultaneously.

Would have to scrounge up some more Windows non-OEM licenses to test that myself…

… so, apparently this has been happening intermittently even after Microsoft claimed to have fixed it. Might be less often, but the only case I’ve run into so far was only after the supposed fix.

Well, depending on how Microsoft has implemented this, could be that the fix just hadn’t made it quite everywhere yet.

Heh, we’re long past the point where any significant change in operating systems is likely “time consuming and frustrating” … except maybe in the embedded / realtime market segment.

I mean, really, I’m sure the Mac user interface is just fine once you get used to it, but…

Well, supposedly fixed or not, we’ve had some pretty new (as in mere weeks old) brand-name PCs with OEM Windows 10 Pro 1803 report as deactivated today…

… but the MX300 had the problem that the permanent (well, until SSD firmware update at the very least) master password was found to be an empty string.

Oh well. I did have a bit of a problem with the BitLocker settings on this particular system, what with a too-old TPM version and all. Was already doing it in software as a result.

So, if you check and find that you’re already doing software encryption, you aren’t in an immediate hurry… until you get new hardware.

“manage-bde -status |findstr Method”

https://portal.msrc.microsoft.com/en-us/security-guidance/advisory/ADV180028

There’s a crucial step in there – you need to change settings to enforce software encryption before turning BitLocker back on.

 

Mind you, the truly paranoid haven’t been trusting the self-encryption on those drives anyway. Just like they don’t trust TPM. Well, I can sort of understand that in some situations, but…

… and that’s the “old” calculator, surely?

$ uname -smr ; dc –version

Linux 4.4.0-43-Microsoft x86_64

dc (GNU bc 1.06.95) 1.3.95

 

Copyright 1994, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2004, 2005, 2006…

Oh, this is the new version, sorry. But at least it’s compatible with the original dc … and I mean,  people still have scripts that pipe all kinds of input to dc, and they’re expected to still work even with this new version.

I still also use things like roff, RCS (really miss human-readable .ini files too, because you could actually do a reasonable visual diff with them!), find|cpio, grep and… well. I’m one of the people who really do benefit from WSL.