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: 2025-05-08

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

I bet that many of you would like to open site links not in the same window, but in a background tab. Such behavior is restricted by default settings of most Hugo themes. Mainroad is restricting it also. Here is a solution on how to overcome weird limitation. Create file render-link.html in _default folder of the theme. Name_of_your_site\themes\mainroad\layouts\_default\_markup\render-link.html Contents of render-link.html should be like this: <a href="{{ .Destination | safeURL }}"{{ with .

UPDATED ON: 2023-02-20 Note is totally rewritten to match 2023 reality. Today it is not an easy task to do. There are plenty browsers out there. “So, what is the problem?” you may ask. Most of them are based upon google chrome. This means that all of them are dialing back to google to share your private data. That’s the main problem. Here is my personal list of browsers that I use in a daily workflow on Windows machine: Main surfer: [Iceweasel 110] ► replaced IceCat For visiting geo-restricted sites: [TorBrowser 12.

UPDATED ON: 2023-10-01

Answer is very plain’n’simple. I like look of png compression especially with Floyd–Steinberg dither filter applied.
Image aesthetics become soooo 80s’ish and this is so, cool! And yeah, I’m saving space of [Codeberg project] on which my blog is hosting.
Thanks to all of them. They even helped me out to setup initial repository of the project. Very neat guys, to say the least.

UPDATED ON: 2023-08-12 Added microsoft hosts, fixed errors. If you have any suggestions or I’ve missed something [please drop me a line] . ► SOME PREFACE WORDS THE MOST COMPLETE LIST OF MALWARE UPDATES FROM MICROSOFT GROUPED BY CATEGORIES. List of updates without links to original ms site due to deletion. KB prefix removed. 454826 971033 2922324 2976987 3012973 3014460 3015249 3022345 3068707 3074677 3090045 3102812 4012218 UNINFORMED ABOUT PRIVACY STARTER PACK FUN FACT: microsoft already not only hiding, but deleting important information regarding “bad updates” from search engines like google.

UPDATED ON: 2024-11-18

Just a simple list of the most important services of Windows 7.
Whatever happens - don’t disable them.
Services are programs, which are automatically loading into memory of your computer during start-up time.
Services are always hanging around in computer’s RAM in background mode. Alternative name: resident programs.
That is why it is so important to cut most of them to free valuable memory up for your personal applications.

Described issue related to Windows 7 and modern AMD-based GPU’s. Some users on Reddit [have reported] ,that there is a problem with modern Radeon cards. Core of the problem: sometimes monitor can’t wake up from sleep state and shows up no signal message, despite the fact that computer continues to operate. Keyboard input, sound output are working normally though. Of course you can set Windows power management not to turn off monitor completely, but this will be quite a waste of energy.

Since Firefox v3.x the browser is capable of managing color profiles like sRGB & AdobeRGB. When a browser doesn’t support color management or it has been badly implemented, images won’t show up right.

Some important links for those of you who care about online security and privacy.

UPDATED ON: 2024-09-12 For those of you, who are wondering about the future of Windows 7 operating system here is a brief chart showing precise timings. END OF …. Windows 7 SP1 Mainstream Support 2015/1/13 Windows 7 SP1 Extended Support 2020/01/14 Windows Embedded POSReady 7 Support 2021/10/12 Windows 7 SP1 ESU Support 2023/01/10 ► WE ARE APPROXIMATEL1Y HERE ◄ Windows Embedded POSReady 7 ESU Support 2024/10/08 Premium Server Assurance Support 2026/01/13

Just a quick note regarding coolness of obsolete cellular protocol. I’m talking about 3G technology.
Recently I find myself in situation when 3G is actually provides greater speed and is way more reliable than modern protocols.

Trick is very simple, if you know where to dig. Just find config.toml file of your Hugo theme and add following section.

I don’t quite understand why people are using horizontal top [MacOS] or horizontal bottom [Windows] taskbars and not vertical one. Most of us are exploiting 16:9, 16:10 or even 21:9 displays. So basic logic confirms that we have more pixels in horizontal plane and less in vertical. So it’s better to save vertical space [pixels], but not horizontal ones. GUI of complex programs like to “eat” vertical space soooo much.

To check system hard drive and fix errors: chkdsk c: /f To check system hard drive, fix errors, locate and mark bad sectors: chkdsk c: /r Very basic command to check integrity of system files: sfc /scannow If sfc can’t help you try DISM. Check system health for any corruption presence: Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /CheckHealth Check system health for store corruption presence: Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /ScanHealth Finally, repair command:

Just a list of items i’m currently seeking for my Windows DOS/98 SE project. It will be primarily focused on simultaneous AGP and ISA availability. Build is almost complete: ETA time -> 1-2 month! 1. CPU: AMD Athlon Barton 3200+ 2. Mobo: Epox EP-8KTA3 or Abit KT7A [motherboard should have AGP and ISA buses] 3. RAM: PC133, 3 x 128Mb 4. Video card: ATI Radeon X850XT PE / X850XT / 9800XT or 3DFX Voodoo 5500

UPDATED ON: 2022-05-17 Added latest AIDA64 FPU benchmark to show supremacy over 12900K UPDATED ON: 2022-05-04 This is the most powerful configuration, which runs Windows 7 without any issues or side effects. Threadripper 3XXX is possible, but micro freezes and stuttering are present, so it is not a viable option for smooth experience. UPDATED ON: 2021-08-19 Added some benchmarks for more clearness. Internet is swarming with [amateurish articles about “incompatibility”] of modern hardware with legacy Windows 7 operating system.

Just want to make a super quick note on neat browsers for legacy operating systems. There is not so much choice for such vintage OS these days. There are two of last Mohicans. K-Meleon & MyPal.     K-Meleon is way more lightweight and will be good for slow puters. There is even a Windows 98 version. While MyPal will bring up more modern web compatibility, but of course it is tad slower than K-Meleon.