"A Laptop With 6 Of The Most Destructive Malware Threats Ever Is Up For Auction WannaCry. BlackEnergy. ILOVEYOU. MyDoom. SoBig. DarkTequila...While some of them are still floating around in the wild, all six of them are currently sitting on a laptop currently being auctioned for hundreds of thousands of dollars... This is the most dangerous laptop in the world. And it's running Windows XP... The singular laptop is an air-gapped Samsung NC10-14GB 10.2-Inch Blue Netbook (200 running Windows XP SP3 and loaded with the malware and restart script... It's currently sitting on a white cube in a room somewhere in New York City and is being sold under the guise of art as "The Persistence of Chaos"... The malware filled laptop is a collaboration between performance artist Guo O Dong, known for putting a hipster on a leash, and cyber security firm Deep Instinct..." https://www.forbes.com/sites/curtissilver/2019/05/15/malware-laptop-auction-chaos/#79ced1d64b96 Current Bid: $268,000 https://thepersistenceofchaos.com/
Dunno if it's the most dangerous, but even at its stoopid current bid price of $268,000 it's far from the most expensive: "1. MJ’s Swarovski And Diamond Studded Notebook: $3.5 Million Black & white Swarovski diamonds and gold-plated body, made this laptop as the costliest piece ever produced. This MJ range includes other expensive versions like the Asus Lamborghini Platinum Crocodile, Acer Ferrari Gold Python, Sony Vaio BlackWood, ASUS Eepc VIP Swarovski. This fashion line laptop includes precious leathers i.e. snake skin or croc skin, golden mouse and other accessories of luxury gadgets..." https://www.blognox.com/expensive-laptop/
I guess they value the price based on the creator popularity, because those malware worth a hundred bucks... For example, Wannacry was the weakest but most visible part of the attack chain, Eternalblue/doublepulsar were the gems.
"A Computer Afflicted With 6 Infamous Viruses Has Passed $1 Million at Auction Bidding for a laptop infected with six of the world’s most famous computer viruses—WannaCry, BlackEnergy, ILOVEYOU, MyDoom, SoBig and DarkTequila—has topped more than $1.1 million at auction..." https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/...viruses-has-passed-dollar1-million-at-auction
If that is "smart capitalism" this must be "genius capitalism" : https://www.npr.org/2019/05/16/7238...lion-auction-record-for-work-by-living-artist
I'd take Vista, over the infected laptop. There is very little difference in performance and stability between Vista with SP1 and 2 installed and Windows 7.
There was only one real difference between Win 7 and all Vista releases; and that was Win 7 worked properly.
Vista pretty much worked perfectly when both Service Packs had been installed. However a bug with Windows Update meant that on some computers, SP2 or SP1 would not install from Windows Update, which left many people stuck with the original release of Vista or SP1.
No it didn't. I ran Vista on two separate laptops (Belnea, Toshiba) with the service packs and they were both sluggish and exhibited the same bugs. Vista was a joke. Win 7 is what Vista should have been. I'm not the only person who had problems with Vista. I should have upgraded both laptops to Win 7 but I didn't as I was convinced Win 7 was only Vista in disguise. I was wrong about that. I'm not wrong about Vista being buggy rubbish though. Eventually I installed Ubuntu on the laptops. Problem solved.
While that was your experience, mine was very different. I upgraded from XP to Vista as soon as it was released and it worked flawlessly. I can't remember having any issues with Vista on that computer. If there were some that I've forgotten about, they must have been very minor. On some computers, the original release of Vista ran fine, on others it was very buggy. However, typically the bugs were fixed by installing SP1 and SP2. A good example of this is, a few years ago I purchased a used Sony VAIO which came with Vista installed and the recovery media had been used to restore it to its original state. While it ran fine at first, after a few weeks of light usage, it started having issues with freezing at startup. I installed both Service Packs and it ran fine again. I've used Vista with both Service Packs installed on a number of computers (not just two, like you) and it worked very well. It's actually only been a month or two since I last used it. If you had issues with BSODs (which a lot of people did), they were usually caused by buggy drivers, particularly ones from Nvidia. Later drivers were more stable.
Oddly I can't recall having a BSOD on either. I had both service packs and both computers suffered identical bugs. These ranged from regularly not being able to connect to the WiFi until re-booted about a dozen times to various media players not being able to play certain file formats. Those are just two of a rain forest of small but irritating bugs. The latter possibly a codec thing but Win 7 or Ubuntu never had these issues. At the end of the day Vista was a sluggish, buggy, flawed and botched mess of an OS that nobody liked. Aesthetically it looked nice, which is all I can say for it. MS fixed Vista eventually. They just called it Win 7.
@Daveski17 Well my experience with Vista is that it is very stable and runs nearly as fast as Windows 7 and I see W7 as only a minor improvement. If I'd had some of the issues you had, then my opinion would be different.
Old laptop infected with the world's most dangerous malware sells for $1.34 million May 28, 2019 https://newatlas.com/malware-computer-art-auction-sale/59857/