UPDATED ON: 2023-08-04 IMPROVING FIREFOX PRIVACY & SECURITY FIREFOX ADDONS [Part I] Finally I’ve managed to finish this part of the FAQ. Note is a loooong-read, so mistakes can occur » please [report them to me] . One of the most distinctive features of FireFox was customization. With each new version it becomes less customizable, thanks to marketing people at mozilla corp. They do everything to make Firefox look like google chrome.

Long time ago I’ve noticed prolonged trend to destroy advanced technology and sell cheap plastic things, powered by marketing slogans, which have zero significance in real life. Appointed trend applies to almost any products in our life, especially consumer and even professional electronics. Some solid proof then. [COMMODORE] brought super advanced Amiga computer in the middle 80s, which had some really advanced stuff like GPU Blitter and Fast-Ram technologies. Nowadays Amd is working on stuff similar to Fast-Ram, which they call Smart Cache.

UPDATED ON: 2024-12-12 I use these automation on daily basis to improve my workflow. All batch files are tested under Windows 7 x64. ► SHUTDOWN PUTER shutdown /p /f ► REBOOT PUTER shutdown /r /f /t 0 ► RESTART AUDIO SERVICE net stop "AudioSrv" net start "AudioSrv" ► DISABLE HIBERNATE powercfg -h off ► DISABLE/ENABLE LAN INTERFACES netsh interface set interface name="Local Area Connection" admin=disabled netsh interface set interface name="Local Area Connection" admin=enabled To reset IP address:

Some really quick software lists with information on which version of application is a last one to run on Windows 98/2000/XP/7. [Windows 98SE Gold] [Windows 98SE KeX] [Windows 2000 SP4] [Windows XP SP3] As for Windows 7 SP2 ESU i maintain my [personal list of trusted’n’latest software] . Coz Seven is my daily driver system. So Windws 7 list will be constantly updated! Don’t forget about my [dedicated WINDOWS 98/2000/XP/7 support page] Imagery by spacedrone808 @Adobe Imagery by spacedrone808 @Freepik

Japanese people always stand out from the grey crowd and they definitely know how to impress audience. Imagery by spacedrone808 @Adobe Imagery by spacedrone808 @Freepik

For example pretend that we would like to move all files from SD-card of the camera, which were created in last 5 days to local hard drive or ssd. We should point out original location, then destination, affected files and commmand parameters. It would be something like this: Robocopy I:\DCIM\100OLYMP C:\Users\User\Desktop\FRESH\ *.JPG *.ORF *.MOV *.AVI /E /MOV /MAXAGE:5 /E – copy sub-folders, including empty ones /MOV – move files instead of copying /MAXAGE:5 – exclude files, which are aged more than 5 days

Collection of 3DFX Voodoo drivers and essential driver library from VOGONS community for retro scavengers. [Neat 3DFX site] ►supported by Polish enthusiast. [Voodoo 4/5 drivers] [Vogons drivers library] ► found drivers for my rare [Pro Audio Spectrum 16] soundcard. Imagery by spacedrone808 @Adobe Imagery by spacedrone808 @Freepik

[Nik Collection] is a great graphical effects plugin pack to work with your favorite raster editor [mine is [Affinity Photo] in case you are interested]. Everything is fine, except annoying update popup, which is opening right after every plugin initialization. Such stuff completely breaks workflow if you don’t want to update for some reason. And there is no way to turn it off from GUI using normal methods. However, you can shut update checks off from configuration file, which is located here:

And will not sing praises on how cool Linux is. Because I know that it has its own quirks and inconveniences. For testing I almost randomly choose [Manjaro Linux] with lightweight [XFCE desktop] . Manjaro is based upon [Arch distribution] .Yeah, ubuntu is too much pop for me. Key benefits of Manjaro are quite transparent: modern & stable environment and pretty vibrant community. I understand that Linux don’t have all software, which I need and try to find software replacement in a while.

For those of you who do not like retro stuff like Amiga page cursor and who want more modern’n’beautiful aesthetics I can suggest neat cursor pack, which is pretty close to classic Mac cursors and for sure [brings warm analog depth] . Imagery by spacedrone808 @Adobe Imagery by spacedrone808 @Freepik

UPDATED ON: 2023-02-20 I recommend to replace Fennec F-Droid with [Mull Browser] due to the fact that is COMPLETELY free from telemetry. In contrast to Fennec Mull browser do not trigger any mozilla or google connections, so take a note. And for God’s sake do not use plain Firefox, it is almost like chrome now! As my main web surfer IceCat begin to showing it’s age and don’t have any new versions apart from “super-new” 68.

UPDATED ON: 2023-02-12 ► Added info on 2.93.15 LTS & 3.0 Final Make sure to check [newer post] regarding refreshed information about modern Blender and Windows 7 compatibility As we all know that last official Blender build to support Windows 7 is 2.92. Next version requires Python 3.9.x, which is not an option for Windows 7. However, there is a possibility to run new 2.93 version via [DLL HACK] , which could be applied even to the newest 2.

UPDATED ON: 2025-01-20 NOTE: list will be updated in the future [final renewal is planned somewhere around 2028]. List of essential software needed for smooth and hassle free system performance. I use these applications on a daily basis. Selection is really private, but nevertheless of this fact I want to share my knowledge with you. List doesn’t contain any microsoft or adobe products. Sorted by usage frequency. Also i’ll do my best to provide final Windows 7 compatible versions of software.

DON'T EVEN THINK THAT WINDOWS 7 IS DEAD! Official extended support for Windows 7 operating system [ended on January 14, 2020] . Home users can’t extend support for the operating system while business and enterprise customers may extend support by up to three years [till January 14, 2023] , to be precise. This is done by joining the ESU program which is available per machine [business] or per user [enterprise].

Here is a short breakdown of the most frequently used commands, which could be launched from the START menu. [WIN] + R ► START ► RUN ► …. CONTROL PANEL control panel LAN CONNECTIONS ncpa.cpl REMOTE DESKTOP mstsc SYSTEM SERVICES services.msc USER CONTROL PANEL control userpasswords2 MICROSOFT CONFIG TOOL msconfig DIRECTX DIAGNOSTICS TOOL dxdiag SYSTEM INFORMATION msinfo32 REGISTRY EDITOR regedit TASK SCHEDULER taskschd.msc GROUP POLICY EDITOR gpedit.msc Imagery by spacedrone808 @Adobe Imagery by spacedrone808 @Freepik

UPDATE 2021-10-11: Added Excellent [APKGrabber] ▓ ALTERNATIVE FIRMWARE As for firmware, I recommend to use [LineAgeOS] if your device is supported. Neat FW with minimal tracking and no bloat from big corps. If there is no native LineAgeOS support check [XDA forum threads] for unofficial ports by community enthusiasts. If your device is not supported in both cases I do not recommend to update stock firmware to prevent bloat’n’telemetry installation.

The roots of bench-marking tools come from [Demoscene] .
The most quality products were crafted by Finnish and Russian coders.
Here is a little breakdown of most notable benchmarks just for your convenience.

UPDATED ON: 2024-10-23

List will be updated in the future.
Most of the applications can be found on [F-Droid market] and work on Android 8.0.
Permissions checker: [Exodus] .

Note: Don’t worry, your eye sight is ok. I’m just testing CRT-emulation mode via CSS-magic. To remove FX click on any other page. Back in Pentium 66Mhz days I was a follower of minimal design and always turned off all fancy graphical beauties, for the sake of performance of course. However, today we are not limited to 8Megs of RAM anymore. Therefore, I have decided to transform my Windows 7 installation into Windows Vista.

UPDATED: 2021-10-05 Some good old-school sites regarding ‘puters and technology. I will update this post when stumble upon something very cool. [Razorback95] ► cool guy doing retro stuff [DXZeff] ► small vintage computer forum, also guy has pretty neat YT channel [Retro revival blog] ► excellent selection of vintage software [Vogons forum] ► the most important place for old school gamers [Old-games.ru portal] ► very vibrant old games Russian community

Software is not perfect. Windows, Linux or any other OS. It doesn’t really matter. In this quick note, I will talk about Windows operating system. For basic deleting of stucked files big chance that you are already using utility like Unlocker or smth. However, some time ago Unlocker was caught in spreading malware, so no trust to this application anymore. As for me, I prefer [Lock Hunter] instead. And what about frozen processes?

Even mighty Windows 7 comes with preinstalled junk. Yeah, you can’t go wrong with Microsoft.
In this posting I’ll point you out some bloated stuff, that don’t need regular home user on normal basis.
All of these should be removed to save your disk space and improve system performance.

For some time I’ve owned Asus Essense STX II sound-card with cool hardware internals, but sh#t-like drivers. Very common situation for modern reality. Except the fact that card is not so modern at all. Asus dropped [driver support] for Windows 7 @ 2015. How cool is that? After some web searching I’ve stumbled upon [Maxedtech drivers] . The overall quality is better, some bugs are fixed, some appeared, but even at this point was not satisfied with system stability.

Quick breakdown of the most powerful AMD-based cards for legacy operating systems. [X850XT PE] ► WINDOWS 98 [official drivers] / Omega drivers ] [HD 3870 X 2] ► WINDOWS 2000 [official drivers] plus some INF tinkering, will review that one later on [HD 5970] ► WINDOWS 2000 [Blackwingcat hacks] [R9 270X] ► WINDOWS XP [official drivers] [6950XT] ► WINDOWS 7 [official drivers] ◄ currently rocking on that one under Windows 7 wing.

Of course you run into situations when you would like to copy “non-standard” files to your Android smartphone and dumb MTP protocol showed up window like this one: And this torture repeated after every new file type copied. Such imbecility can be removed by following command in admin console: regsvr32 /u wpdshext.dll That’s all, limitation is gone. Another hint, which potentially can help to overcome weird design of MTP protocol.

Straight’n’essential advice: do not use google, yahoo, bing, yandex, rambler or mail.ru. More trust goes out to [DuckDuckGo] . However, even they have not so good reputation if we look into the past dealings with Yahoo. Use [StartPage] if you want to get results similar to google, but beware that they are not exactly the same. Startpage removes some stuff and adds some of it’s own. In general, it is proxy to google with so-called de-anonymized search queries.

UPDATED ON: 2024-01-04 Addons, addons, addons!! So many of them! How to choice the right one? Whom to trust to? I will help you with your findings and share my personal experience. Rule of thumb: do not install too much addons, they will slow down your browser noticeably! ░ SECURITY ADDONS [uMatrix] ► best content blocker ever, even better than uBlock [Github archive] [Ublock Origin] ► an efficient blocker. Easy on CPU and memory.

UPDATED ON: 2023-11-23 There are already plenty of excellent articles explaining why [WINDOWS 10] / [WINDOWS 11] IS A COMPLETE SH#T. So, I better be quick not to be pain in the neck or a master of boredom. Essential question: “Why you don’t like modern Windows?” Ah, yeah… one more new link, even better than previous! [A THOUSAND REASONS NOT TO USE WINDOWS 10] ░ DESIGNED BY MARKETING PEOPLE… …not engineers