are windows XP safe to use?

Did anybody check their credentials? Thought not!

 

G'day,

Others have already mentioned Linux in this thread. Linux running a PC is generally free from the "security" issues that have encumbered/bloated Microsoft operating systems and programs for so many years.

If you want to keep using XP off-line but occasionally want to go on-line from that machine, you could try a Puppy Linux.
Puppy doesn't need much RAM (256MB or more) and runs mostly, if not totally, in RAM, so is usually very fast on older computers. Most Pups are under 400MB in iso-download size so don't take up much of a hard-drive however installed.

If you're really paranoid about the internet, Puppy can run your computer from a USB thumb-drive or CD-ROM and doesn't need to use your hard-drive at all. If the Puppy USB is plugged in when you start up, Puppy will be the OS. If it's not plugged in, XP starts up. The computer has to be able to boot from a USB device or a CD-ROM, of course, but XP came on CDs so that should not be a 'show-stopper' in this case.

Puppy can be 'frugally installed' on an XP system partition/drive and only booted into when you want to go on-line. Your XP doesn't have to changed, just add a boot-loader so you can pick either XP or Puppy when starting up the computer.
Puppy can also run most older Windows programs (via wine) or there is a comparable Linux version of a lot of software.

There'll still be a Linux-learning curve for Windows-only-ever-users if you try any Linux operating system.

Of course, a Linux operating system, like Puppy or say Ubuntu, has the added advantage of being free (as in cost, as well as care-free).

David S.

 

I upgraded to win 10 on my custom wc pc and disabled all the spyware that is built in side win 10.I still miss win 7 but being gamer I had to upgrade to win 10.




Posted via the PriusChat mobile app.

 

"Need" is a bit of a relative term for this. I think some sort of firewall is always a good idea. A software firewall is built into all the Linux distros that I know of. AV and spyware software isn't really critical imho, but some Linux users will disagree strongly. Linux is pretty resistant to hacking attacks and virus software, but all systems are vulnerable to trojan horses.

 

G'day friendly_jacek,

No need for AV or other 'security software' with Linux. So no more Norton coffee breaks.

I've been pretty much Windows-free for about 10 years now and although Puppy comes with a firewall, I don't bother turning it on since our home network sits behind a router.
Viruses are written in Windows code so don't work in Linux - indeed, I don't think there are any Linux 'anti-virus' programs, apart from those intended to repair Windows computers?

I believe malware is browser-related so may not affect the computer and its operating system, if you're not actually running the affected browser? I usually avoid browser updates that are related only to 'security issues' since I read this as 'Windows-security-issues' and are irrelevant for my computers. It's irritating when a site pops up a message that I'm not using the latest version of a browser as though it's important for me. I grudgingly update when there's an improvement in the program or an add-on.

Unfortunately, because of the ongoing problems with Windows systems, the newest computers (like the box you described?) are becoming so 'closed off' in their BIOS that it's getting harder to add another operating system to them. A USB-stick booting may still let you run a Linux system but won't be as simple to get going as it used to be.

Luckily, my computers are mostly about 10 or more years old so I've had no problems wiping Windows where not needed. As an aside, I was amused to buy a desktop a few years ago and told the salesman I didn't want an operating system and didn't need all the RAM he was used to supplying with Windows - 1GB was quite enough for me and Puppy.

Anyway, what ever you try on your old computer, such as a Live-CD or USB-boot as the easiest/safest first leap, remember there'll be a learning curve because it will be Linux not Windows, just like we all had to go through with Windows from DOS - and still do apparently with each new Windows version, for the habituated.

Have fun, it's only a computer, with a fully functioning OFF button, after all,

David S.

 

I actually had to think about that since I haven't booted up a personal PC in a while (work PCs run Win7 with IE/FF/Chrome)
I believe my "GTMO Special" (last PC I bought back in the early 2000's for a Navy deployment) is running Mint with Firefox.
I also have the option of booting into XP for offline work.

You might benefit from a TOR browser behind a tails-OS stick.

Tor stands for "the onion router" (different kinda Onion, not the satirical kind) which people use when they want to have the illusion that they can be anonymous on the internet.
Tails is a live OS that you can use on a PC where (typically at work or on a public PC) that will allow you to fool yourself into thinking that you can connect to the internet and use a TOR browser without leaving any evidence on the PC that you boot the CD or USB with......and for all that it's moderately effective - effective enough that most people with proper IT departments take one of two strategeries:
1. Disable non HDD booting and USB ports.
2. Allow non HDD booting and keep USB ports open and monitor for suspicious activity - concentrating on the miscreants that stumble in.

For your purposes (browsing without worrying about viri/ransome-ware/etc) it might be very beneficial since it can be made to be resistant to getting slimed.
Just don't confuse a moderately secure browsing environment with some place that you can do on-line banking, stock trades, shop for adult entertainments or look up interesting instructions for manufacturing homemade destructive devices....

 

Bravo! Well said!

 

G'day friendly-jacek,

I'm on Firefox at the moment - about version 45.something. I found I needed to update a browser so I could see the family's WhatsApp messages from my phone on my desktop via the home network.

For years I'd been using only Seamonkey which is the original mozilla/netscape suite of browser, mail and html composer. Still keep my mail in Seamonkey but have variety of browser-only packages as well (e.g. Chromium, Slimjet) as these tend to be updated more frequently to be able to run the latest internet fads.

As you can read in ETC(SS)'s post, there are Linux systems that run the computer from a USB stick, or as a Live-CD where your hard-drive is unneeded and left out of any harm's way - 'sandboxes' are also being introduced into Linux OSs as another means of isolating your browsing from your OS and computer data if you think you are vulnerable in what you want to do.

ETC(SS) mentioned Mint (a derivative OS from Ubuntu, both very popular Linuxes) on a USB; I have set up old computers using various Puppy versions on USB sticks (if the computer Bios will boot from one) or on a CD where that's the only means available in the Bios). Puppy is quite small by Linux (and Windows) terms so only needs a 750MB CD not a DVD, in case the optical drive is also quite old. If there was anything really important on your XP drive, I'd take it out and give the computer a clean while you're at it. Just don't put the XP drive back in while doing your Linux 'test-drives' - be a drive-less driver. I'm assuming there's enough RAM for you to play this game - say 1GB for Puppy, maybe +2GB for Mint.

So I'm suggesting hastening slowly - run a Linux via a stand-alone USB or CD and be confident in its peculiarities, and only then go the dual-boot route. Dual booting does require you modify your hard-drive, although not XP much. The problem is often the master boot record gets altered so XP won't start. Of course, you can mount (read and write to) your hard-drive from the Linux USB/CD if needed but always with care - I hope you've a copy of XP on disk or USB just in case.

Linux OSs come with at least one browser, and once on the net, others can be downloaded if the original is not to your fancy or need. Banks used to be 'funny' about browsers but maybe not so much nowadays. The "other"-browser download goes onto the unclosed/rewritable CD or the USB and is installed there - hard-drive not required.
Bookmarks and address books can be exported from your XP to a USB or 'the cloud' and then imported into the Linux USB/CD when that's running your computer. Running live, you may need to set your browser cache to some limit, particularly if viewing lots of videos, so the USB or particularly the CD does not fill up.

It's all easy when you know how (or, in my case, when I think I do or thought I did), but what ever you try, be prepared for that struggle of 'the new' when logic seems often not part of the equation and the instruction manual is only understandable by those that wrote it (or the wife or grandchildren).

David S.

 

You're right. Java is constantly having to be patched because of its all security....
BUT, Windows XP security flaws are no longer patched up. Thus, we maintain it is very risky to use it online.

 

G'day friendly-jacek,

Good to hear you've got a Pup installed on your old computer.

I'm used to doing it all with just Puppy so don't know anything about Lick.

But I see the Live-CD worked well and you're now dual-booting. On starting the computer, you get a menu to pick either XP or Slacko to be the operating system?

It does take a while to load an operating system from a CD - just remember how 'enjoyable' installing Windows was (or is).

Puppy was devised to keep old computers going so is small in memory requirements (begun when a MB was something big) therefore basic in things like desktop appearance. Often compared to XP in this regard.

You can change the wallpaper in slacko (e.g. add your own jpg to /usr/share/backgrounds - put the jpg onto a usb stick then with Puppy Slacko running, insert the usb and 'mount' it - click on the usb icon when it appears on the desktop and you then should see the files on the usb) and drag the jpg file to the /usr/share/backgrounds directory open in another Rox window).
Different icons are also around - explore the right-click 'Desktop' menu options to change things there.

If you installed slacko frugally onto your hard-drive (the better set-up option) , as a set of three static unchanging files, and created your own 'save' file that holds all your changes and extra programs, etc, made as Puppy runs, then if you crash Puppy while exploring and playing around, just re-boot the live-CD with 'puppy pfix=ram' at the first screen (so you don't reload the corrupted save-file) and once you're running Puppy again in its 'factory settings' state , simply delete just the save file. You could do this save file deletion from XP as well, just leave the three basic Puppy files.

Other Pups you could try would be a Tahr Pup, say version 6..0.5 (well-developed) while XenialPups are the latest Pups based around the Ubuntu namesake but are still being tested. Feel free to try any that sound interesting - it's all good clean fun.

Mint is a Ubuntu derivative and will be bigger (so fancier to look at) but is more traditionally Linux, so doing stuff within Mint may involve using 'sudo' and command-line inputs? I think being user-friendly was on the Mint 'desirables' list so should also be good for Windows refugees.
Mint is well respected and claimed easier to use than most big Linuxes so I'd be interested to hear how you find Mint goes on your computer.

David S.

 

Different threat vector, Besides.....Snowden has to change his underwear every time somebody beats on his door or a truck backfires.

Tails IS good enough for internet banking, provided that your bank doesn't have a problem with its use, but I would probably stick with Chrome running on a cell phone (Updated constantly/pretty secure connection) or a home Linux platform like you're building.
IOS is OK too, but they get attacked as well.

Tails is NOT good enough to keep you from getting slimmed or monitored if you do something that is a lot more interesting than shopping on Amazon or fussing at Wells Fargo for banking fraud.
I'd just be a little careful presuming that there's nobody watching you.

Most of the time, when internet pick pocketing occurs the victim helps out.......a LOT!!!
All of the oiniony browsers and ISO/IEC 18033-3 security techniques in the world aren't going to help you if you're stumbling around in bad neighborhoods, drunk, and looking for a good time.
The internet is like a big city.
Bad things usually only happen to people who are interested in doing bad things, or are just not street smart.

Example....if you're using a non-updated, brown box router that the nice people at Big Phone or Big Cable provided you with then you're front door is locked, but it's a REAL CHEAP lock and the key is under the door mat.
It's OK for the burbs......but you don't do that in downtown LA.
I advise people who worry about such things to buy an aftermarket router that's updated regularly by the manufacturer.
Just remember.....this CAN be the home internet equivalent of nitrogen in tires:
Big Money.
No actual measurable benefit.
You can easily blow $300 on a router that is no more secure than the freebie brown box unit that the telco gives you when you sign up.
In fact, they generally brag about putting out enough RF energy to blister paint which is exactly what I would NOT want if I lived in an apartment building, where people brag about never having to get their own internet connection.

I personally don't follow my advice to others in this regard because............I live in the internet suburbs, and I'm BORING.
BUT.....even though I leave my front door insecurely locked, there's the internet equivalent of an alarm system, an ankle-biter yippy dog, and a pump shotgun inside.
.....and all of my neighbors have open doors.

After all.......I want to STAY boring.

Your call.
If you want to while away years of your life, you can go down the wabbit hole of opinions on internet security, and read arguments that are even more pointless that the oil and car wars on this site.
This car > that car type stuff.

You're asking questions and taking action.
This makes you a harder target than your neighbors, which lies at the heart of security.

Make bad people go elsewhere.

Good Luck!

 

G'day friendly-jacek,

Your first impression of Mint is the same as I had when starting with Linux and I ran Ubuntu off a live CD - very pretty to look at, but for a Windows-only-experienced novice like me, too different to be comfortable or intuitive. If I had been trained in Unix and systems administration, there would have been no problem.
I later found Puppy in its very early stages of development, thanks to a mention of it by Windows computer journalist Fred Langa some years ago. He liked it even then.
Puppy was intended to be small, simple, fast and for a single-user computer (i.e. just me on my computer) - like Windows was in the early days (I began with 3.1, a big step forward from DOS-6.2, but still crashing frequently and needing those long re-installs - 'the good old days' (not)!).
Linux/Unix has all the security (and complexity) built in to enable 'safe' computing by many users on multi-computer/workstation networks. Making this OS normal-user-friendly as opposed to nerd-friendly is its on-going challenge. I think I've heard Apple starts off with Linux in creating its OSs and Android is also a Linux off-shoot, built to suit their end-users (or suppliers)?

Re mounting drives:
In Puppy, if you see a row of drive icons along the bottom of your desktop screen (with names like sda1 or sdb2 or dda1 or sr0 beneath - these are like the C, D, etc. drives in Windows), clicking once on the icon of a chosen drive/partition should mount it. A small triangle or circle, often green, will appear at its top corner to show it is mounted and can be written to or read from. A Rox (file-manager) window will open and show the directories and files in the root of the just-mounted partition.
To unmount a mounted partition, so it cannot be accidentally written to or otherwise altered, click carefully on the green triangle/circle and if this then disappears, leaving the plain drive icon behind, the partition is now unmounted.
There is also the Pmount program in the Filesystem Menu which does the same thing with more detail shown.
NB One partition icon will be for that partition with the OS that's running the computer - it will have a similar small triangle/circle on its icon but red or orange to tell you not to de-mount it by clicking on that triangle/circle - this stops the OS communicating with the computer and things stop working in an often unpleasant way (time to re-boot).

Be cautious with mounting your XP drive in that with Puppy you are now able to delete anything - any file on a mounted drive. In recent Windows, and while running Windows, it will try to protect itself from you by not permitting you access to some parts of your computer.
Puppy gives you omnipotent god-like powers within your computer but if you're not also omniscient, be wary in exploring the windows system directories.
On the other hand, Puppy is used by those 'in the know' to fix Windows problems because of its anywhere access capability while running in RAM or from an external device.
Data directories on your 'C/' drive are fine to explore and copy once mounted.
Probably good practice to unmount any partitions you mounted before shutting down - Puppy does unmount 'stray' mounted partitions when it closes but getting used to mounting and unmounting should be encouraged.

Do a de-frag before using GParted - in fact, defrag before installing any Linux system as Windows is/was messy but Linux is tidy - think 'The Odd Couple' - and issues can arise from an attempted install to a highly fragmented drive .

GParted
This is a 'powerful' application and watch what you do as you are fundamentally changing the lay-out of your hard-drive. No 'Un-do' here. You are now in charge of your own computer.

Step 1 would be simply to run GParted and scan/check your hard-drive, and look at the data presented by GParted. Make notes and think about a lay-out to suit what you think you want to have.
Step 2 would be to Resize/Shrink XP's partition - I used to give XP about 30GB - see how much is 'used' by your XP according to GParted and double it? This re-sizing could be done by Windows too - I just cannot re-call where or how in Windows to do it but it may be better to first try XP to shrink itself and leave the 'empty' drive space for GParted to format as wanted.
Step 3 would be create and format a new partition or three for Linux installations into some of the 'empty' space. If you don't have a lot of RAM (say, <1GB), you could create a small Linux swap partition (there's a special format for swap partitions) of say 2x your RAM.
Mint should suggest a suitable minimum size for an install; Puppy probably needs nothing bigger than 5GB per partition. Leave 'empty' space for use later depending on how you find things. I like to leave most of my hard-drives for 'data' - my stuff.

Installing beside XP
I'm not sure if you were asking about Puppy installation, Mint installation, or both to co-exist with your XP. So I'll start with just Puppy.
Puppy has a Universal Installer program in its (right-click) Setup menu and an 'Install' icon on the desktop. This will offer to install Puppy with a step-by-step method, with plenty of options/times to cancel/quit if you get worried.
A traditional/legacy install of a 'Full' Puppy needs its own partition separately from the XP partition. This is where GParted or similar program can resize '/C' and create new partitions in the 'free space' now on your hard-drive. A Full Puppy needs a Linux-style formatted partition, called 'ext2' or 'ext3' for example, not the ntfs format of XP. I give Fulls about 4GB each.
The better and more flexible Puppy install is a Frugal install where Puppy can be on the ntfs partition with XP or in its own partition. Just a few files in a sub-folder is all Puppy uses to frugally run the computer so these can be put just about anywhere.
You do need to install a 'boot loader' program that when the computer starts up, will offer you a menu of OS options - this loader directs the booting to either XP, or to wherever Puppy or Puppies are. Grub4Dos or GRUB are names of commonly used boot-loaders by Puppy. After Puppy's universal Installer has copied the files needed to run Puppy, it will then offer to install Grub or Grub4Dos to your computer. The mbr has been always safe for me as the Grub install location - new computers may be trickier due to new BIOS setups. My computers are mostly small form HPs of 2006 average vintage.
Once done installing, shut down the computer, remove the Live-CD, and re-boot. A menu list should now appear offering XP or Puppy - the default should be XP if you don't highlight the Puppy line in 10 seconds.

Mint installing
If you want to install just Mint with XP, there should be an installer option somewhere in Mint's programs on the Live-CD. It may pop up when you close Mint down? Google may help if you can't find where it is. It's been a long time since I put Ubuntu on a computer so can't help with how it's done now.
The only thing I would note is the big OSs usually don't easily install together and there is a 'pecking' order to follow:
Windows first,
then big Linux (e.g. Mint or Ubuntu)
and lastly Puppy.
So you could end up with all these together in a poly-boot system, although Mint's set-up for its boot-loader may require Puppy to perform a few tricks during its last install.

Live-running over installing
Yes, you said it seems a long time for Puppy to boot from a CD (about as long as XP on a hard-drive?).
But not every Puppy user installs Puppy on a hard-drive. Re-writable DVDs and increasingly USB drives are employed, as a hard-drive is not needed given the size of Puppy and the memory capacity of these 'external' drives nowadays.
A USB boot is a bit quicker than a DVD/CD and USBs are now much bigger in memory that a DVD.
So while you're still looking at options, and getting to know the differences between Windows and Linux OSs, and do stuff in Linux, keep the USB-boot option in mind. Mint probably can do this too but may need an 8GB thumb-drive. Puppy has been OK on a 1GB for me, although now 8GB is about the minimum size I can buy in a store. Blame Moore's Law, I guess.

And remember, I did tell you to 'hasten slowly' .

Anyway, let me know how you go, or if you have a concern before doing anything that sounds a risk.

David S.

 

^ I have to admit....I haven't tinkered with Puppy much, but you're giving me thoughts about grabbing an old XP box and tinkering with it.

Great write-up!

 

G'day ETC(SS),

Being small and open-source, Puppy is very good for tinkerers, or even wanna-be tinkerers like me.
I was sad when Apple went 'closed' and the little knowledge I had of AppleSoft became useless. Windows didn't seem ever very tinkerable to me.

If Puppy has one problem, it's that it's so easy to make your own Puppy OS that many 'tinkerers' put up their own versions of Puppy for others to try.
I have about forty different Puppies on my desktop computer so my start-up menu list is now in three parts - Full Installs (each with its own partition - two hard-drives with 15 partitions each helps), Frugal installs (20+ in one 30GB partition with room to spare), and 64-bit Puppies (but I prefer the 32-bit at the moment which have more apps.).
Bit like when buying a non-cyber puppy - there's just so many to pick from if you don't have any prior preference.

There's a PriusChat equivalent if you get interested:
Puppy Linux Discussion Forum :: Index - Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Have fun, it's your computer after all,

David S.