Appalbarry writes:
"Microsoft is about to abandon Windows XP to the wolves. Fair enough it's ancient. However, there are still going to be a lot of XP boxes out there, and a fair number of them are unlikely to ever get upgraded until the hardware dies.
My question is: what's available to help make this old OS stay reasonably secure and safe for the people who can't or won't abandon it?
Over the years I've been through Central Point Antivirus, Norton, McAfee, AVG, stuff like Zone Alarm, and of course the various Microsoft anti-malware offerings. But since moving over to Linux I really haven't kept up on the wild and wonderful world of Windows security tools.
Suggestions?"
(Score: 2, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Wednesday March 05 2014, @02:56PM
Using a VM under Linux seems to be the way to go if the legacy software needs to be net-connected. You can keep backups of the entire VM within Linux, so it will be possible to back out of trouble if it should occur.
Which brings up some follow-up questions.
(1) Which VM is appropriate? safe? efficient?
(2) Is there a VM that can take an existing Windows system and virtualise it, or is it necessary to start with a fresh XP install on the virtual machine?
-- hendrik
(Score: 2, Informative) by dilbert on Wednesday March 05 2014, @04:31PM
(Score: 1) by hendrikboom on Monday March 10 2014, @06:18PM
Are both Virtualbox and VMware proprietary? If so, I may just end up meeting the same fate with them as with Windows XP now. And do they run under Linux?
(Score: 1) by dilbert on Monday March 10 2014, @06:37PM
Excerpted from https://www.virtualbox.org/ [virtualbox.org]:
VMware offers VMware Player at no charge, but it's not open source. VMware Workstation is not available at no charge, but had additional features above VMware Player.
(Score: 1) by dilbert on Monday March 10 2014, @06:42PM
Both VirtualBox and Workstation are both supported on Linux.
At home I use VirtualBox on Linux every day without any issues.
I've used Workstation at work on a Win7 machine, but I've never used Workstation on a Linux box.