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Keeping XP Secure

posted by LaminatorX on Wednesday March 05 2014, @07:30AM   Printer-friendly
from the unplugging-the-network-cable dept.

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?"

 
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  • (Score: 1) by hendrikboom on Monday March 10 2014, @06:18PM

    by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Monday March 10 2014, @06:18PM (#14153) Homepage Journal

    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

    by dilbert (444) on Monday March 10 2014, @06:37PM (#14167)
    VirtualBox is open source and available under a GPLv2 license. Oracle does have a proprietary 'Extension Pack' which enables things like USB support, but it's not required.

    Excerpted from https://www.virtualbox.org/ [virtualbox.org]:

    VirtualBox is a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2.

    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

    by dilbert (444) on Monday March 10 2014, @06:42PM (#14171)

    And do they run under Linux?

    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.