MEPIS Community Forum

I've actually been running my XP naked for the last year or so. I rarely boot into it, and never for anything involving the Internet. Having to wait 10 minutes or more for it to catch up on updates before I can use it frosts my cookies too much, not to mention the performance hit with this old single core processor.

I only have Windows (XP) for one program and don't import data or allow it to see the Internet I run Windows bare nowadays also. The best security is not having to have it because there is no exposure.

I suspect that I was 'infected' during my first year with a computer. After that I may have done more than needed to keep clean but I didn't worry much either.

lucky, if it was windows xp and you didn't have AV installed, chances are that your system was infected within minutes of being on the net. microsoft has gotten better at security, not great, but i was always amazed at the average infection times for unprotected xp systems.

In my experiments doing fresh installs of Win 95, 98, 2000, XP, with all of the save me software installed before connecting to the net. Once connected to net and the system was up, less than
30 seconds, something was trying to get in.

I was in an irc chat room years ago when an older lady comes in and says her computer has a virus. I remarked "probably got it from one of those porn sites". To this day I worry she took it the wrong way. I was just trying to be funny.

Interesting. I use MSE and MBAM on my WIndows machine and I install it on machines run by family members if they will let me do that. The combination seems effective. My personal computing is done on Debian or Debian-based Linux almost exclusively. Frankly it runs better and it is much easier for me to manage.

It's not the pr0n sites themselves that get you, it's the places you land while searching for pr0n. Or so I'm told.

Every time my boss gets his machine infected I offer to show him where the clean sites are (the ones I've been told about), but he hasn't taken me up on it yet.

The bad guys are quick, nimble, and adaptive.

My girlfriend, by no means a computer noob, was following the last Winter Olympics with great interest. She was searching for the results of a particular game from earlier that day, and boom! her laptop's XP was badly infected.

Fortunately, I had put Mepis on her PC some months before, but she had never explored it. Within a day she was insisting that I put this Mepis thing on her laptop too. She's never looked back.

When I ran XP I was on dialup and used a router to connect to the modem. Never got infected, but I did scan for trojans and virues about once a month.

What part of 'and don't import data or allow it to see the Internet' wasn't understood? A router all by itself is a big plus. I don't count MSE as a separate entity even when I used to actually use Windows on the Internet. As noted I never had a problem. Perhaps I go to sites that aren't unsafe. Heck, I ran Windows 98 SE without problems. I used a router, firewall, SBS&D, and usually Avast! but sometimes Kapersky. Avast! was easier to install and maintain for me. MacAffee (used when I first began to use a computer and the Internet) and others of its ilk were gone once I knew more about what was going on.

I can foresee a time when it will be illegal to expose a computer to the Internet without some form of protection. Maybe to even just sell one without a virus checker.