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Duh, XP Home wasn’t good for home users either, but at least it was less bad than w10 Home.

I mean, simple thing, games for the children… games only ran with admin rights on XP Home. On XP Pro, Power User was sufficient. And giving all the kids admin rights just was never very reasonable – have to have enough isolation to not have them accidentally wipe each others’ files and settings…

Windows 7, pretty much the same thing.

But 10 Home … depending on what hardware and drivers you may have, you may need to have admin rights to be able to log in. (Seems to be at least some AMD GPU drivers.)

The environment where the deficiencies of the Home editions give the least trouble, is very small businesses, and maybe possibly some students.

… hm, it seems that the “broad filesystem access” privacy settings entry just isn’t there at all in at least W10 1709…

Now, from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49728846/uwp-c-sharp-folderpicker-without-dialog and elsewhere, broad filesystem access was supposed to either not exist or default to off in older versions.

Anyone know which versions are vulnerable, then? From context I’d guess at least 1803 but could go way back…

 

 

I suppose these scammers are rather less common around here. Hard to be convincing about being from even our big national telco or some such if they don’t speak the language, I guess… and since there’s still no good-enough online translator, email scammers don’t get far either.

 

Oh, the base / general functionality gets tested quite well, that’s not the problem.

It’s mostly just the anti-exploit/anti-ransomware/”anti-0-day” functionality that’s a problem for testing – it’s a lot more complex than the traditional kind of malware prevention…

There’s a test result set on the heuristics available from AV-Comparatives… the latest one was published in April 2016 and had tested products from March 2015. “… due to the large amount of work required, deeper analysis, preparation and dynamic execution of the retrospective test-set”

AV-Test doesn’t specify details, they supposedly have a 0-day test but they don’t even specify which version of Windows 10 their tests were run on, much less actually what was included in the test set and what prerequisites would detection and prevention have…

So no, I don’t think I can use either to meaningfully compare current third-party offerings on exploit mitigation to  Microsoft’s tool that’s only available from W10 1709 onwards.

… so, let’s see…

1. UWP apps from outside the Store have direct filesystem access on by default in previous versions of Windows 10, but off by default in 1809. The bug is that the permission dialog doesn’t display automatically on first instance of the specific app requiring this permission.

2. UWP apps that need direct filesystem access and don’t have it, throw an exception that defaults to crashing the app unless caught. The permission state can change while app is running and takes effect immediately.

Now, unless there’s something even weirder going on, surely the user’s UWP apps still run in the normal user context and thus only have at most as much capability as the user’s non-UWP processes, thus not causing any inherent extra risk just due to being UWP? Such as in this case with a business-specific internal app, apparently…?

What I find potentially somewhat risky is the unexpected state change, which logically might prevent the app from saving its data to disk, thus having the potential for data loss. This is not markedly different from non-UWP apps running into an unexpected permissions problem at file open time but might differ for files that were already open, or does the UWP platform prevent continuously open files or something?

 

Not going into whatever may be going on with the Store – the “vetting” processes would reduce risks but not eliminate.

Ascaris wrote:

greynad wrote:

Above bothered me a little, I’ve never got anyone past a Live session because ‘it looks old’, so I downloaded XFCE 17.1.12 and installed…

I am not sure what you mean. People look at the live session and quit because they don’t like the theme? Are these people who have never seen any program or OS that can be themed or skinned? That just boggles my mind. Xfce is not what I would consider feature-complete. 

Well yes, Xfce is sort of a niche product limited in what it does, but what it does it actually does quite decently. Looking old is a desired feature for some, too, it even seems to keep your settings just fine and still work and look the same when you skip one LTS version and just move your ~ across… unlike KDE, GNOME or whatever, apparently.

Besides, funny how you mention the theme/skin thing and then have a problem with the resize handle size – well yes, they should have it usable by default (like it used to be back in … which version was that again?) but it’s rather less work to fix than to find a better whole theme.

Oh well, I still occasionally even miss VUE for a desktop environment, and not even because it’d have been particularly good…

Actually, isn’t Access the one component of MS Office that there isn’t an Online version of? (Or a Mac version…?)

Also would seem that of all the components in the respective suites, MS Access / LibreOffice Base is the one pair where there’s the least overlap in features such as file format support.

I mean, sheesh, MS Access supports connecting to Outlook address book but not Windows system address book – LibreOffice Base supports connecting to Windows system address book but probably not Outlook? Old Ms Works databases open in LibreOffice Base but not in Access, … Access can import a table one-way from Excel while keeping formatting, LibreOffice Base can open a spreadsheet directly in read/write mode but doesn’t deal with formatting properly…

One significant thing that Linux on USB sticks is used for, is diagnostics and repair – it can deal with all kinds of weird things with at the very least more data in the error messages than the usual with Windows…

One major “pro” thing for VM is that you can have both running simultaneously – or just the host. The obivous “con” from there is that when running the VM, you then have to support the processing overhead from both, even before counting for losses to the VM subsystem (which can be quite variable, depending). Also only need to have drivers for the actual hardware on the host side, the VM only sees the VM subsystem, in the usual case.

Another “con” is that while Linux would tend to be the better choice for host on the technical side (really, I have a bunch of still-good hardware where the Windows drivers have been EOL for a while now but Linux drivers are still officially vendor-supported and all, and that’s not getting into I/O schedulers and disk management) Windows licensing for VM guest use can be a bother.

One notable thing that is a bother with Linux is Broadcom wireless adapters.

This is because Broadcom’s license doesn’t allow redistribution of some necessary components without specific authorization, which is in turn is incompatible with the GPL’s requirement of not limiting redistribution… so with those, the usual way is to install the thing with a wired network attached and after installation, do a “sudo apt-get install firmware-b43-installer” to help you get the missing pieces directly from Broadcom.

(Yes, you can find that in the additional drivers section from the graphical interface too, but explaining that tends to be a lot more work than one command line…)

One thing a VirtualBox VM is not useful for, is testing for hardware support – because in that case all it sees for hardware is the VM.

(Well, actually, you could test for generic trackpad support or some such in a VM even if you don’t have a real trackpad, because you can fake it in the VM config, but…)

Running from USB, you do get the actual hardware and can do device driver testing.

Hm, yes, Word 2, used that one for a long time myself too… But my automatic habit still tends to be more in the way of ^[:w for some reason if both my hands are on the keyboard. ^S if the other hand is on the mouse, of course…

Autosave in Office is something I usually prefer to disable, because the silly thing also considers non-data changes as something to be saved. Excel is particularly annoying with that.

 

Yeah, sort of normal for the cutting-edge builds to be slightly buggy but this is feeling like more than just slightly.

Oh, forgot to mention, I’m running this on W10 pro v.1709 / 16299.726 as of now.

1 user thanked author for this post.

Latka

I was the anonymous poster. Confirm again, just a couple of seconds ago had Outlook 10827.20181 crash on me. There was a crash notification but it wasn’t visible for even a full second…

Then again I’m on the cutting edge on purpose, so that I’d see these problems before the supported end users do, and make a point to have alternate tools on hand for actual work.

3 users thanked author for this post.

Elly, Jan K., woody

Such a master patch list for servers would be nice but might be a lot of work.

Servers tend to be a lot more diverse than desktop systems especially for the weird and business-critical stuff, after all.

Also from my testing – you can’t really trust page rendering to behave exactly alike between different base builds of the same Office version, or those with a different set of fonts installed.

That used to mean just Mac vs Windows version of Office except if you used a custom default font, but that’s a significant group already – graphic designers who do a fancy layout “just right” and save as a template from Word for Mac really shouldn’t be surprised when it’s not always exactly the same in Word for Windows.

I also understand there have been some rendering differences between Android and Windows versions of Word. Android at least used to be (well, last year…) closer to the subset of features that’s the Online version of Word.

 
Then there’s the fun part where Powershell .csv export is more compatible with LibreOffice than MS Office…