back to article Still not on Windows 10? Fine, sighs Microsoft, here are its antivirus tools for Windows 7, 8.1

Microsoft has back-ported its Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) security toolkit from Windows 10 to Windows 7 and 8.1. The release will allow those holding out with older versions of the OS to get the exploit and malware-infection detection, prevention, and event reporting features offered by Windows 10. For …

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  1. bazza Silver badge

    Wild Arse Guess

    Could this be them thinking, "there's a lot of Windows 7 machines out there that we don't want falling victim to Meltdown / Spectre vectored threats, 'coz that'd make us look bad even if it is an old OS."?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      'that'd make us look bad even if it is an old OS."?'

      Maybe, but I for one will be watching-out for any new 'telemetry'!

      1. bombastic bob Silver badge
        Devil

        a CLUE has been GOT!

        You know, I just see this as a positive sign. It makes me smile! Well, just a little...

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: 'that'd make us look bad even if it is an old OS."?'

        If they can inject telemetry here on a pair of 32bit, octocore ARM's, more power to them. I was already moving my x86-64 machines off of the Internet before. Meltdown/Spectre merely reinforce my paranoia as I do all sorts of insane things expecting reliable results. Thankfully, I made heterogeniaty something of a feature here in my laboratory. If I can't rely on the results of my testing regime, where are those of us on the cutting edge of computing going to end up?

        Adding ATP to the mix as a mitigation means exactly nothing when it comes utility here. Lipsticks, Pig.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Fuck off Microsoft...

    I will never run your shitty code again. And Sadnad - get fucked.

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Fuck off Microsoft...

      Why don't you say what you really think.

      1. The Blind Watchman

        Re: Fuck off Microsoft...

        Sounds like he has an infection of the brain. maybe he needs an update? Staying with Win 7 as long as possible. Meltdown has already been patched. Still waiting on Intel to come up with microcode patches for Spectre, so perhaps comments need to be directed elsewhere.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Fuck off Microsoft...

      Well I'd never really seen the point of FOSS before, but such an erudite and well-reasoned analysis as that has really made me begin to question my assumptions ...

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Angel

    MS Give Windows 7 & 8 users a Virtual Machine with their previous Windows 7 & 8 O/S in it.

    I am glad the genie is granting wishes for Windows 7 users. there is no reason for Microsoft to have taken so long to see support for its other Market share as anything but good. to snub its users is to snub it's future customers.

    I still need and use programs than don't not work well with Windows 10, nor do I have a tablet and like many dislike the tablet interface.

    If I had known that there were virtual machines built into Windows 8...8.1 and Windows 10, I could have migrated my old operating system to a virtual machine on Windows 10, and would have adopted it early.

    Doing now is difficult as I have OEM versions of both Windows 7 and Windows 8..8.1 (Update Anytime).

    I have not seen any method that installs windows and migrates Windows 7 into a virtual machine on the same system. (While I have over the years use Linux in VM's, I don't need it at present. It won't work for me.

    So I suggest that if Microsoft wanted to migrate Windows 7 & 8 users to Windows 10 all it needs its to create a free (if you already have a license) virtual machine with good flavors of Windows 7 or 8.1 already installed to run on all devices, in a Window 10 Virtual machine. So that people sys-admins and general users could maintain & fulfill their needs on Windows 10 operating system.

    Continued support.

    I use Defender sometimes it did not update and I would have to resort to the downloadable update .exe 64bit and 32bit versions, this worked for my Win 8.1 64bit PC but would not work for Win 7 32bit machine. Any extra help in this regard from MS in upgrading Defender is therefore appreciated.

    PS to update defender this way make sure it open when running update exe

    1. tony trolle
      Megaphone

      Re: MS Give Windows 7 & 8 users a Virtual Machine with their previous Windows 7 & 8 O/S in it.

      well there is that VMware vConverter tool to make a .vmdk in a live system then use that in VirtualBox or VMware Workstation Player.

      1. bombastic bob Silver badge
        Devil

        Re: MS Give Windows 7 & 8 users a Virtual Machine with their previous Windows 7 & 8 O/S in it.

        how about convert your existing Win10 into a VM [for those things that may require it in the future] and THEN UPgrade to 7?

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: MS Give Windows 7 & 8 users a Virtual Machine with their previous Windows 7 & 8 O/S in it.

          Now you're being silly. Anything which you can stuff in an .ova file can be run on any platform. Well, I'll grant the exception when it comes to Mac, although that speed-bump there is minor. I've been virtualizing that since the 1980's, on a hypercapable Amiga.

          1. JLV

            Re: MS Give Windows 7 & 8 users a Virtual Machine with their previous Windows 7 & 8 O/S in it.

            >Anything which you can stuff in an .ova file can be run on any platform

            Not really. I'd assume your over-the-counter-purchased Win 10 can't host its old Win 7 license as guest, unless you have enterprise/site licensing or whatever.

            You can't use a single-use license Windows to host itself. i.e. if I buy Windows 10 Pro/Home, I can't have a VM running that license again as guest, even as an older release, I have to buy another license. If that has changed, feel free to downvote me, it's a small price for learning something new.

            And that's a big difference. Hence Linux VMs. Even Mac VMs can do that, they only restrict you on the hardware.

      2. This post has been deleted by its author

    2. Craigie

      Re: MS Give Windows 7 & 8 users a Virtual Machine with their previous Windows 7 & 8 O/S in it.

      'I still need and use programs than don't not work well with Windows 10'

      Which programs? I'm curious as to what still doesn't run in Windows 10. I've yet to find anything, though I confess most of the tools I use are written by Microsoft anyway.

      1. myithingwontcharge

        Re: MS Give Windows 7 & 8 users a Virtual Machine with their previous Windows 7 & 8 O/S in it.

        "Which programs? I'm curious as to what still doesn't run in Windows 10. I've yet to find anything, though I confess most of the tools I use are written by Microsoft anyway."

        How about Microsoft's own Visual Basic 6? Still widely used in enterprise. Though some third party has written vb6installer to mostly solve this.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: MS Give Windows 7 & 8 users a Virtual Machine with their previous Windows 7 & 8 O/S in it.

          Microsoft's own Visual Basic 6? Still widely used in enterprise

          If your enterprise is stuck in the 20th century, that is.

          Let's put it this way : VB.Net is 17 years old.

    3. inmypjs Silver badge

      Re: MS Give Windows 7 & 8 users a Virtual Machine with their previous Windows 7 & 8 O/S in it.

      "don't not work well with Windows 10"

      The problem with Win 10 is not what doesn't run on it. It is it running shit built into it that you can't get rid of.

      1. Mi Tasol

        Re: MS Give Windows 7 & 8 users a Virtual Machine with their previous Windows 7 & 8 O/S in it.

        Got it in one.

        I recently got a Win10 laptop very cheap and virtually never used because the owners had bought it to replace a lower spec Win7 box. Because it was so woefully slow they quickly went back to the old win7 box and offered the win10 for sale. I got it to run a laser engraver out in the shed and it was so slow at everything that I soon got so p155ed off that I formatted it and installed Win7. It is a good little computer now, quick and usable

    4. JohnFen

      Re: MS Give Windows 7 & 8 users a Virtual Machine with their previous Windows 7 & 8 O/S in it.

      "I could have migrated my old operating system to a virtual machine on Windows 10, and would have adopted it early."

      But then you'd have to put up with Windows 10.

  4. Dwarf

    Marketing vs reality again

    "We hear from our customers security is one of the biggest motivators for their move to Windows 10,"

    You are partly right - up to the point of mentioning Windows 10, with all the slurping of our data we have no security, which is why acceptance of the software is low. Those that care about security refuse to use it.

    Time to read the dictionary again and work out the difference between the words "mine" and "yours"

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Marketing vs reality again

      Corporate Windows versions dont slurp your data though.

      1. MrDamage Silver badge

        Re: Marketing vs reality again

        Corporate versions will slurp your data, unless you specifically opt out of it.

        Where I used to work, it took 3 months of harrowing the folks in charge of creating the SCCM images to make even the most basic of changes to avoid the slurping, and even then, it was just telemetry and feedback.

        The sharing of everything with all the apps, and Cortana's stalking, was still enabled, and I wasn't allowed access to create GPs to do the job properly.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Marketing vs reality again

          "Corporate versions will slurp your data, unless you specifically opt out of it."

          No, corporate Windows versions dont slurp at all. Its consumer versions you have to opt out of it on.

          "and even then, it was just telemetry and feedback."

          Corporate versions dont even have the capability to record or send such data. Other than optionally crash dumps, and windows has done that for many years.

          1. JohnFen

            Re: Marketing vs reality again

            "Its consumer versions you have to opt out of it on."

            Wait, Microsoft has changed its mind and is finally allowing people to opt of their spying? How is that not headline news?

          2. myithingwontcharge

            Re: Marketing vs reality again

            "No, corporate Windows versions dont slurp at all. Its consumer versions you have to opt out of it on."

            Windows 10 Enterprise slurps by default and requires a group policy to stop. "Profesional" (which I would counter is nothing of the sort) has no option to stop the slurp as it ignores the policy (there is even a warning about this in the group policy editor).

            So just which "corporate" version are you referring to?

          3. JLV
            Thumb Down

            Re: Marketing vs reality again

            >Its consumer versions you have to opt out of it on

            Yes, please do provide us with the Win 10 navigation options we can use to ask MS to entirely turn off all telemetry, using its own tools and configuration, on Home/Pro versions.

            "Opt out" doesn't count as MS-offered if you have to install all sorts of hacks and workarounds from 3rd parties, including hacking your router because MS doesn't respect /etc/hosts when it comes to its telemetry.

            In that case, "workaround" is the word you're looking for.

      2. terrythetech

        Re: Marketing vs reality again

        Most windows users aren't corporate!

    2. Dave K

      Re: Marketing vs reality again

      "We hear from our customers security is one of the biggest motivators for their move to Windows 10,"

      In my experience, the two biggest motivators are the fact that Windows 7 goes EOL in less than 2 years (and companies have bad memories of the rush and cost when it came to eliminating XP usage before support ran out), plus the fact that MS has made sure that it's increasingly difficult to buy new systems that support Windows 7 (due to the Kaby Lake+ block).

      As such, most customers I see are moving to Windows 10 because they're being forced to do so, not because they want to. And it's not surprising. Most companies want a reliable and stable platform for their systems, not one that gets regular and major "feature upgrades" that offer little-to-no benefit whilst making office PCs unusable for hours at a time (due to the upgrade), and also causing additional downtime (when a PC fails to upgrade properly).

      Hence, many customers don't like Windows 10 compared to Windows 7, but feel as if they have little alternative right now.

      1. psychonaut

        Re: Marketing vs reality again

        fyi, you can use this patch

        https://github.com/zeffy/wufuc

        for kabylake and win 8.1 , probably win 7 too , although ive only tested it on win 8.1, and it worked* (not for me, for some insane customer who insisted i build him an 8.1 machine)

        *works so far...

        1. Jaap Aap

          Re: Marketing vs reality again

          Wufuc works great, also on windows 7. I really wonder what the acronym stands for.

          The last batch of new computers are all equipped with a core i3-7100. We use wufuc to make windows update work. And a couple of edits to the .inf file of the intel graphics driver to make that work.

          We also have a couple of hotfixes slipstreamed in to the Windows 7 N installation, otherwise we would not be able to install to NVMe drives.

          Too bad microsoft raped the LTSB version, we would have moved to that.

      2. TVU Silver badge

        Re: Marketing vs reality again

        "Hence, many customers don't like Windows 10 compared to Windows 7, but feel as if they have little alternative right now"

        The good news is that there are already secure Windows-like alternatives in the form of Linux Mint Mate, Zorin and Linux Lite.

  5. Winkypop Silver badge

    For Sale: In the Fort Clark, North Dakota area

    Free blankets!!

    Surplus direct from the military smallpox infirmary in St. Louis.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: For Sale: In the Fort Clark, North Dakota area

      Something a certain future General by the name of William Tecumsah Sherman managed to get his name tied to. That's aside from the California Revolution, both times.

      NB: California history is a prerequisite if you want to teach in this state.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Letter To Redmond...

    #1. Those devilish plans for a Facebook-like 'Slurpy-OS' . That's what you promised Wall Street - monetizing slurp at OS-level. But that new telemetry monitor, doesn't even let users delete data which won't cut it with GDPR!

    #2. Your greatest mistake is with long-term MS developers. Forcing updates onto systems without permission and borking machines causing instability to apps. A generational hiring shift has caused more coders to go freelance with no LTSB. You've unleashed a hornets nest here. Dev work is difficult enough without having the OS operate like a moving Target!

    #3. There's a watershed moment not reflected in Linux usage stats. MS devs like myself have had enough, and are converting old XP/Vista/Win7 boxes to Mint etc for family / friends / colleagues for free. I'd never have taken on that workload before. But now I actively encourage it. I know hundreds of devs in the same boat, converting and spreading the word. The paltry Linux take up figures don't reflect this. We enable dual-boot on the machines too, which also skews the numbers. What this really means is, new Win-10 pc's aren't being purchased, which isn't good news for you!

    1. bombastic bob Silver badge
      Unhappy

      Re: Letter To Redmond...

      "Dev work is difficult enough without having the OS operate like a moving Target!"

      exactly. when a project cycle is YEARS long, you can't jump on "new, shiny" you have to code for what's available NOW.

      related, rumors suggest the possible abandonment of the 'Windows API' (formerly known as Win32 API), thereby forcing devs to use UWP and code for Win-10-nic only. They're probably just FUD, but I dunno, Micro-shaft has done similarly bold [read: boneheaded] moves...

  7. Snowy Silver badge
    Facepalm

    Supported until January of 2020.

    Sure it is, if it was truly supported then you would have added this ages ago and not with so much reluctance.

    OKay so it is extended support which seems to translate to "We would rather not support it, but it would look bad to dump it"

    1. bombastic bob Silver badge
      Unhappy

      Re: Supported until January of 2020.

      and after Windows 8.1 is no longer supported, what then? [see earlier post regarding FUD/rumor]

  8. rtb61

    Push comes to Shove

    Want to be privacy invasive, want to control what is on my hard disk drive, want to install software at any time for any reason, fine FUCK OFF. They can either keep fixing windows 7 or I am switching away from M$ done and finished, as simple as that and already my next desktop is extremely unlikely to be windows.

    I will never install the shit licence version of windows 10, never.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Is that weird or what?

    Microsoft noted that Windows 7 is still slated for retirement in January of 2020.

    January 2020 is the same date I slated for retiring my last Microsoft operating system! What are the odds?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Is that weird or what?

      "What are the odds?"

      Well, if you play games, run business applications or need an Office suite that actually works then it's quite unlikely that you will.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Is that weird or what?

        Have you actually USED Linux or @ best tried it for an hour or less?

        Actually that's a no-brainer Because you very plainly haven't have you. Just for laughs try Deepin & you may well find for yourself that its past time to engage the brain God gave you & stop shooting from the lip.

        I use Libre Office rather than MS Office & while Libre is open source surprise surprise MS Office runs very well under Crossover as does just about every business application I've chucked @ it.

        On the games front you have a better case but one that is rapidly flying out of Microslurps window, (Pun intentional) thanks to the process concerning which the OP wrote.

        1. verno

          Re: Is that weird or what?

          Honest question, are you able to install the click to run version with Crossover? With Microsoft retiring the msi with Office 2019 that might cause issues (admittedly old office versions are mainly fine but it you need vba and security updates for office...)

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Is that weird or what?

        I'm not a gamer, I don't run any essential Windows-only apps, and I've been pretty satisfied with LibreOffice for three or four years. I ran PCLinuxOS for a year, eleven years ago, on a laptop that wouldn't run Windows XP stably. OpenOffice was a noticeable step down from MS Office back then, but otherwise I was as productive as I was on XP. (The downside was that I learned next to nothing about the nuts and bolts of Linux ... because I never had to.) Not long after Windows 10 was released, I began trialing various distros of Linux with various desktop environments in VirtualBox. (Linux Mint Cinnamon is the front-runner so far, but that could be in part because it's been the least hassle to get and keep running perfectly in VirtualBox.) Long story short, it's extremely likely that I'm switching to a bare-metal install of Linux by the time Windows 7 reaches end of life.

      3. MJI Silver badge

        Re: Is that weird or what?

        I play games a lot, and on a device NOT running Windows.

        It is made by a Japanese company you may have heard of.

        Playstation 4 (had 3 and 2 before it)

    2. chivo243 Silver badge

      Re: Is that weird or what?

      @AC

      +1 What are the odds?

      The only Windows in use at home are for testing to keep the bacon on the table.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I think this is good news

    I think giving access to your PC to all these third party "antivirus" companies is a bad thing.

    Limit exposure by not letting third party companies have low level access.

    I'd prefer to keep it "in-house".

    The whole "Meltdown" fiasco has shown that several of these companies have been digging into protected memory.

    Some of these "security" companies have even partnered with big data "analytic" companies.

    Avast for example purchased Jumpshot, which according to Avast's official website is: "a big data and advanced marketing analytics platform designed to provide insights into people’s online behavior" and at the same time purchased software to scan the users social media.

    https://www.avast.com/en-us/history

    Makes you wonder.

    1. wallaby

      Re: I think this is good news

      "Makes you wonder."

      2 for one on tinfoil hats aisle 2

    2. Roj Blake Silver badge

      Re: I think this is good news

      Certainly you should be cautious about using free AV software, but there are some decent providers with subscription models out there (F-Secure, ESET, etc)

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