4 ms·

Not sure, I tried doing it myself once and it was a rabbit hole of scripts and changing obscure settings in the command line. After somewhere between 12-18 hou

Not sure, I tried doing it myself once and it was a rabbit hole of scripts and changing obscure settings in the command line. After somewhere between 12-18 hours of solid work there was still so much left open, and I came to realize it's simply impossible to have a copy of Windows 10 that doesn't spy on you in some way. For example, hardware profiling. Attach a printer to Windows 10, Microsoft will receive the hardware ID. Sell the printer on craigslist. A political party uses it to print propaganda that is considered illegal. Don't be surprised when the police are at your door in two weeks. With support for Windows 7 Professional ending in 2020, I'm not sure where to go from here. I can just hope that VR and similar recent tech is fully realized on Linux or Linux+Wine in that time.

einr 8y ago
With support for Windows 7 Professional ending in 2020, I'm not sure where to go from here. Maybe you'll be able to do what some folks did with Windows XP and use a registry hack to trick Windows into receiving security patches for Windows Embedded POSready 7, which is the embedded Point-Of-Sale version of Win7. This is going to be supported until 10/12/2021. Of course, this is a very fragile and hacky solution that I would be unwilling to use on boxes running important stuff. I'm in the same quandary and I think I'm going to just disconnect all my Windows 7 boxes from the Internet on the end date. Although a bit of a bother I will still be able to do my music production, games and graphics stuff without Internet access, and all the day-to-day Internet stuff I can migrate to Linux. Maybe use disposable Windows 7 VM's for random lightweight Windows-only stuff.
- kakarot 8y ago
  As it is, I run Windows in a VM with IOMMU, firewalled incoming connections, host-level VPN, etc., passing through a Geforce 1080 for direct access, and I only use it for specific purposes. Everything else is done in other VMs that run Linux. It's a similar setup to Qubes. I also do music production and graphics and game programming in Windows, so I'm totally with you on how fucked this is going to be in a year. One of my biggest issues is that I know for a fact my fb2k visualizer doesn't work under Wine. One possible solution I've thought about for using a non-networked W7: * Set up a separate VM with allocated storage that gets broadcast as a set of read-only local network drives * Add both W7 and this VM to a private network without net access * Access the netdrive on W7 and copy any files with which you need write access to a W7-only storage partition. Seeing as how we seem to have similar use cases, I'm happy to give you some pointers on setting up something similar to what I have.
  - brokenmachine 8y ago
    Ableton is literally the only thing keeping me tied to Windows. Also I don't like Apple with all their user-hostility, so I'm not sure what I'll do later. I don't want to dual-boot. I investigated running Ableton in a VM but I'm just not convinced it'd work well, Linux support for audio is so flaky, I can't believe it'd handle low-latency ASIO stuff.
    - kakarot 8y ago
      I use Ableton in a VM and it works great, but I wouldn't use it for live performances just to be sure. I haven't 100% eliminated all crackling yet. If I had more cores and moved Windows to a separate SSD, then I think that would completely get rid of crackling. Crackling only happens because of DPC latency, cache misses, or heavy write operations outside of the VM. I pass through a dedicated ASIO-compatible soundcard, dedicated GPU and dedicated USB controller which takes care of most of the DPC latency and latencies due to USB host translation. I lock down my cores in such a way that Windows has access to three physical cores and my host machine has access to only one. They don't share. This heavily reduces CPU cache misses. I use hugetables to prevent memory-related issues. Though that's more for gaming. There are a bunch more tiny optimizations I've made that also contribute to its viability. My latency is just about as good as it's going to get with Windows vs Mac. Happy to help you achieve a similar setup.
      - brokenmachine 8y ago
        > Happy to help you achieve a similar setup. Thanks, I might take you up on that. A dedicated GPU might be a step too far though. What VM host software are you using?
        kakarot 8y ago
        It really helps with DPC latency issues, though. You could get a pretty cheap one like an RX 550 or Geforce 1030. I'm hosting on a libvirt/qemu/kvm stack with virt-manager as my interface.

einr 8y ago

With support for Windows 7 Professional ending in 2020, I'm not sure where to go from here. Maybe you'll be able to do what some folks did with Windows XP and use a registry hack to trick Windows into receiving security patches for Windows Embedded POSready 7, which is the embedded Point-Of-Sale version of Win7. This is going to be supported until 10/12/2021. Of course, this is a very fragile and hacky solution that I would be unwilling to use on boxes running important stuff. I'm in the same quandary and I think I'm going to just disconnect all my Windows 7 boxes from the Internet on the end date. Although a bit of a bother I will still be able to do my music production, games and graphics stuff without Internet access, and all the day-to-day Internet stuff I can migrate to Linux. Maybe use disposable Windows 7 VM's for random lightweight Windows-only stuff.

kakarot 8y ago
As it is, I run Windows in a VM with IOMMU, firewalled incoming connections, host-level VPN, etc., passing through a Geforce 1080 for direct access, and I only use it for specific purposes. Everything else is done in other VMs that run Linux. It's a similar setup to Qubes. I also do music production and graphics and game programming in Windows, so I'm totally with you on how fucked this is going to be in a year. One of my biggest issues is that I know for a fact my fb2k visualizer doesn't work under Wine. One possible solution I've thought about for using a non-networked W7: * Set up a separate VM with allocated storage that gets broadcast as a set of read-only local network drives * Add both W7 and this VM to a private network without net access * Access the netdrive on W7 and copy any files with which you need write access to a W7-only storage partition. Seeing as how we seem to have similar use cases, I'm happy to give you some pointers on setting up something similar to what I have.
- brokenmachine 8y ago
  Ableton is literally the only thing keeping me tied to Windows. Also I don't like Apple with all their user-hostility, so I'm not sure what I'll do later. I don't want to dual-boot. I investigated running Ableton in a VM but I'm just not convinced it'd work well, Linux support for audio is so flaky, I can't believe it'd handle low-latency ASIO stuff.
  - kakarot 8y ago
    I use Ableton in a VM and it works great, but I wouldn't use it for live performances just to be sure. I haven't 100% eliminated all crackling yet. If I had more cores and moved Windows to a separate SSD, then I think that would completely get rid of crackling. Crackling only happens because of DPC latency, cache misses, or heavy write operations outside of the VM. I pass through a dedicated ASIO-compatible soundcard, dedicated GPU and dedicated USB controller which takes care of most of the DPC latency and latencies due to USB host translation. I lock down my cores in such a way that Windows has access to three physical cores and my host machine has access to only one. They don't share. This heavily reduces CPU cache misses. I use hugetables to prevent memory-related issues. Though that's more for gaming. There are a bunch more tiny optimizations I've made that also contribute to its viability. My latency is just about as good as it's going to get with Windows vs Mac. Happy to help you achieve a similar setup.
    - brokenmachine 8y ago
      > Happy to help you achieve a similar setup. Thanks, I might take you up on that. A dedicated GPU might be a step too far though. What VM host software are you using?
      - kakarot 8y ago
        It really helps with DPC latency issues, though. You could get a pretty cheap one like an RX 550 or Geforce 1030. I'm hosting on a libvirt/qemu/kvm stack with virt-manager as my interface.