Warning! You are about to enter highly theoretical zone.
This small article is a result of a late night chat with ChatGPT about theoretical and practical limits of performance achievable using conventional lithography, so consider it a first collaborative effort of myself and AI. Also i will try to extrapolate this topic to Windows 7 environment.
If you’re a user of an old operating system, that doesn’t mean you don’t want to have a good system performance.
Most of you have favorite PC audio player of their own, in my case it is [Foobar2000]
. In Android 6 times there was a wonderful software called [Foobar 2000 Controller]
. It was made to control audio player remotely from your smartphone in a convenient way. For some reason i recall it today and decided to record installing process for future use.
Guys from [Hydrogen Audio]
forum helped me out in some questions and pointed me to the right direction.
I used to think that the 18.x version was [the last to run on Windows 7]
.
And now I am glad to tell you that enthusiast hackers from Russia made quite a neat and generous thing to backport NodeJS 22 to Windows 7 environment.
Such occurrence was super useful since i was already running into some limitations with [NodeJS 18]
and was thinking about moving my project to the Linux environment.
WE ALL WANTED THAT, DIDN’T WE?
[Tor Browser 14.X]
based upon Firefox 128 ESR is finally hacked to work in Windows 7. Thanks flies out to valorous [Blaukovitch]
!!!! Here is a safe [Mega.nz mirror]
to preserve history as usual.
Also you might be interesed in [original site]
and [Github page]
of the developer.
Imagery by spacedrone808 @Adobe Imagery by spacedrone808 @Freepik
It has been a while since i posted web performance comparisons. So here it is in all it’s useless glory. Performance was measured by [JetStream]
benchmark. Two machines were tested: low-end office computer and powerful workstation.
► Intel i3-3220/16Gb/IntelHD
+ Firefox 115.17 ESR RedFox 132 Chrome 109 Supermium 126 Score 54.896 65.033 80.217 90.038 Stdlib 0.566 0.638 0.920 0.777 MainRun 0.190 0.224 0.309 0.339 First 53.755 65.282 53.610 72.162 Worst 54.
As a long-term user of Android OS i stacked up the most irksome peculiarities. They have been with us for ages, since version 1.0 to be exact.
messed up separation between internal and external storage, which is not clear to a generic windows user, files are hard to find, applications save data randomly either on internal or external storage, logic pattern is definitely broken here incoherent and unclear notification system, with poor organization of priorities absence of transparent file handling, i am talking about file extension-application matching, there is no convenient tools to manage this task And it looks like google will never fix above mentioned facts.
In the last couple of years I dedicated most of my free time to self-learning the barebones of modern web technology, things like: HTML, CSS, JS, WEBPACK, PUG, various frameworks like Hugo and other web tech trickery. For those of you who are interested, here is my [Github page]
. Who knows where the VScode will take me?
I hope that these technologies will be a nice addition to my knowledge of raster & vector software, which I use as an [active microstocker]
.
No illusions here, because it is a pretty transparent question and you don’t have to be an overwhelmingly smart person to understand it. Here is a handy list of straight facts about why Linux will always be your secondary operating system and not your primary one:
as of 2024 we have over 600 [!!!] distributions of Linux, just look at [distrowatch]
Why do we need them all? plethora of desktop environments > 50 [if we count only major ones it will be close to 20] As if three variations were not enough?
UPDATED ON: 2024-10-16
If someone doesn’t like this kind of information, I will remove it immediately on first request without any questions. Since we have crossed the EOL line of Windows 7 POS support, I think no one will mind if I post the list of current activators for the Windows 7 operating system.
As far as I know, we have four options to choose from:
[DAZ loader]
► 108% working solution to activate distributions based upon classic MBR partition [KMS by Ratiborus]
► rearming software, which can activate GPT-based Pro and Enterprise editions [KMS rearm script]
► rearming scipt, which can activate GPT-based Pro and Enterprise editions [RemoveWAT]
► legacy GPT compatible activator [not maintained anymore] Also list of activators can be found on [this page]
.
Yesterday was the last update aimed for Windows 7 POS devices. Comprehensive details can be found at [Ghacks]
.
Windows 7 is an operating system which already outlived Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 10 and Windows 11. Also i would like to point out some relevant Windows 7 pages
for die-hard fans like myself.
Imagery by spacedrone808 @Adobe Imagery by spacedrone808 @Freepik
As you may already know i am using [Windows 7 as a daily driver even in 2024]
pretty much for everything. I think most of the sofa expert’s conclusions about Windows 7’s obsolescence are [out of touch with reality]
. ACTUAL HARDWARE SETUP:
32-thread modern CPU 64Gb of DDR5 RAM fast NVME drive 24Gb of video memory
WHO NEEDS MORE?
Such hardware specs are achieved by [CanonKong’s modern chipset driver]
.
First of all, I’d like to note that this post is not an advertisement and it is not sponsored, I’m just REALLY impressed by software and decided to share this lucky find with all of you.
Actual Window Manager has quite boring and generic naming, but in reality it is highly advanced and modern window manager that offers broad functionality combined with 90’s quality.
Adding this software to your arsenal it’s like entering cheat-code for superpowers.
So you want to do something evil or make a present for the April’s Fool Day to your surrounding. Today we’re going to use the professional keyboard application [FilterKeys Setter]
in its meanest form, will set keyboard filters to skip keystrokes, but only if the person starts typing at a faster rate.
I find out that the easiest way is to set Ignore Under parameter somewhere around 60ms, so it will be not so obvious in the beginning for the end user, that key strokes are skipping.
[HighTreason]
is not that active these days, so i have to find a solid substitute for my retro hardware cravings. And, oh boy, that was not an easy task to complete, i can barely find a solid reviewer among hundreds of sellouts, boring and just plain ignorant vloggers.
But in the end of the day i found him! Yeah, it is [RetroSpector78]
from Belgium. His speciality is producing reviews of obscure and rare pieces of computer hardware [primarily from 80s-90s era] with episodic dives into the software field.
Color profiling in Linux is a rather obscure and unpopular topic, so I decided to cover it on the pages of this website. KDE and other modern heavy desktop environments are often have preinstalled tools to work with color profiles, but in this note we’ll talk about importing of color profiles in my favorite lightweight environment called XFCE. In some Arch-based distributions like Manjaro everything works out-of-the-box, but that is not the case when it comes to EndeavourOS, which I am currently studying to migrate from Windows 7 in upcoming future.
UPDATED ON: 2024-11-12
Due to the fact that I was forced to use windows 10 at my primary work, I have to accumulate all these software to prevent myself from daily vomiting provoked by original windows 10 diarrhea.
Ok, kids, you don’t like the native looks of Windows 10? So am i! That is why today we transform atrocious Windows 10 interface into clean looking heaven of classic Windows 7.
Messing around with the recently purchased Ryzen 7700 i ran into some rather annoying power related problems. The computer and monitor would go into sleep mode after about 5 minutes, despite the appropriate power settings in the Control Panel and third party software such as Process Lasso and Park Control being residential in memory.
I had to break my head to get out of this situation and traditionally i am sharing with you the solution I found.
In this note, I will describe all the settings you need to tweak to get a 100% flicker-free, eye-friendly result on your smartphone. However, some settings are quite extreme and you don’t need to apply all of them, such as the monochrome filter or setting extremely high warm values on the color temperature slider.
PWM flickering is a “feature” of most digital displays at relatively low brightness levels that can cause eye strain and headaches.
UPDATED ON: 2024-09-11
Good news for all Windows 7 users! Material is provided by [official release calendar]
. SO, IT LOOKS LIKE THAT 115 BRANCH WILL BE THE LONGEST SUPPORTED ESR BRANCH EVER! Please, take a note that 115 ESR branch is [significantly slower]
than [hacked R3DFox]
! Firefox 115 ESR is for those people who prefer only official versions and do not trust to third-party developers.
Imagery by spacedrone808 @Adobe Imagery by spacedrone808 @Freepik
No posts about VS Code for so long time? This should be fixed.
Today i’ll do a little note regarding visual looks of the editor. Honestly, I already have my personalized theme. But after seeing [Retrowave84’s skin]
, I was so impressed with the overall aesthetics and correctly set glow and shadow effects, that I decided to stack it on my own theme, to get the best things from both of them.
I have a ton of various batch files and scripts that i use in my daily process to simplify routine actions. Copy/move files, start/stop services, run applications with specific parameters, embed Exif tags, and much more.
Most of them are executed by assigned shortcuts. Because of their quantity they begin to interfere with global shortcuts of installed software. That’s why I want to draw a visible logical line between shortcuts for scripts and shortcuts for applications.
It was more than a two-year long run with [44 thread Broadwell]
, quite a nice heater. I have really enjoyed running multi-threaded workloads on it, but it is time to move on. As you may remember i’ve already tried [AMD in 2021]
, just to make sure that it is possible in a Windows 7 environment. And now i would like to jump on the red train again.
UPDATED ON: 2024-09-07
Internet is swarming with instructions on how to do this in a proper way, but all of them are incomplete and it looks like the authors don’t care much and don’t put enough effort into making them really shine, so i decided to fix that confusion and write my own, uber one.
Computer user ergonomics is a really complex thing, so I split the FAQ into several sections for better readability and understanding.
Firsts things first, for better file handling install [Midnight Commander]
:
sudo apt-get install mc Download fresh version of webserver software:
sudo apt-get install apache2 Locate and edit configuration file:
/etc/apache2/apache2.conf Note that in some distributions it can named as httpd.conf.
No file at all? You can create it by:
touch apache2.conf For relatively easy editing i recommend Nano editor.
sudo apt-get install nano CTRL+O ► to save file CTRL+X ► exit file Here is an example for locally placed development webserver, containing two sub-domains.
Although I have been using Linux more and more in recent work, Windows 7 remains my main production operating system. And here is an excellent finding for Windows 7 crony named [Capster]
. Its main functionality is to launch the specified executable at startup time when the [CAPS LOCK] key is set to ON or OFF. I use Capser to run backup script, that backs up previously selected folders [if i want to].
Say you are trying to install software and receive message from the operating system about untrusted certificate in certificate chain. In such case you need to import certificate of the middle-man organization into the Linux certificate storage to make things happen.
If for some reason your third-party certificate comes in DER binary format, you should convert it to CRT format:
openssl x509 -inform DER -in certificate.der -out certificate.crt Copy to storage:
Recently run into excellent rant about Windows 7 operating system. Totally agree with all the things mentioned. Here is a heap of my personal screenshots just to back up this speech.
FIREFOX SUPERMIUM [CHROME] LIBRE OFFICE BLENDER VEGAS PRO SOUND FORGE CAPTURE ONE VIRTUAL BOX CODIUM [VSCODE] GIT NODE.JS PYTHON JAVA VISUAL C++ Plethora of other software including: [7-zip]
| [Discord]
| [Telegram]
| [XNview]
| [Foobar]
that runs actual versions just fine, so i do not understand these comments about the obsolescence of this nice operating system.