"Let me know Should I stay or should I go"
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blackbird71 last edited byWhile I agree that XP is becoming a relic from an online perspective, if a user for whatever reason wants to keep an XP system alive and running, that's up to him. From a file system and debugged code standpoint, the OS has become quite solid. For online usage, of course, the XP user must recognize and accept the eventual security risks and the ever-widening circle of incompatibility issues he will soon encounter. If XP works fine for what the user wants, there's nothing wrong in continuing to use it (keeping in mind the preceding caveats). I still run Win98 and WinXP systems for various computational reasons, but I won't ever take the Win98 system online any more since almost no current antimalware software will work with it, either to protect it or to clean it. The XP system will not be far behind it over the next couple of years, as compatible anti-malware starts evaporating.
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A Former User last edited by
Black, you say one can even go online for the nearest year or two? Or it implies special skills/attention?
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blackbird71 last edited by
Black, you say one can even go online for the nearest year or two? Or it implies special skills/attention?
A lot depends on your tolerance of risk. What I've adopted in the past with an old operating system is a method of keeping my eyes continually open at some security forums for reports of new vulnerabilities in the old operating system. If nothing shows up and as long as you can keep getting updates for your antimalware, you really face nothing more dangerous than what you're already facing online. If you start seeing reports of new vulnerabilities affecting XP (which of course won't be patched), then you'll need to explore how those impact you in what you do online, whether there seem to be any workarounds outside of XP or any protective settings or disabling you can adopt to keep you safe. What finally killed Win98 online for me was the eventual inability to obtain any decent Win98-compatible antimalware updates or software after around 2009 or so. The last year I ran the system online, I had every thing web-facing locked down to the point of utter inconvenience to avoid the risks of getting whacked, since I couldn't keep the antimalware up to date any more - it all finally just became too much of a hassle, and I took the system offline in 2010.
If I had to guess at a point where XP users will start to feel a measurable pinch, I'd probably say by about 2 to 3 years from now. After that, things will likely start going downhill fast, at least in terms of finding much compatible new software. Once antimalware makers stop making new product versions for XP, their updates for their older XP-compatible versions will begin to cease not long thereafter (a year or two more, max). No guarantees, of course, but this is what has previously been rather typical for an expiring software.
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A Former User last edited by
IIRC, Microsoft announced they would maintain MSE updated till July this summer...
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blackbird71 last edited by
The thing is, July will be upon us before you know it. It's only a guess, but I suspect Microsoft will dump MSE for XP users well before some of the other free AV houses (who will likely keep XP support going for a couple of more years), simply because Microsoft has a vested interest in herding folks toward their newer OS product lines. I'd seriously be checking into reviews and user comments regarding other free AV's compatible with XP in the meantime, before July arrives.
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A Former User last edited by
If you're going to continue using XP and want to avoid an infected system, you must now make it a practice to frequently and routinely check for security-alarm reports out on the net regarding new XP exploits that can penetrate your system. New exploits pop up literally overnight, and many of them are designed to affect even an old operating system. If you discover a legitimate report, you will need to take your own remedial action (if any is even possible) to protect your system. Microsoft is no longer informing you or protecting you against risks to your old operating system. Don't count on antivirus necessarily blocking them, especially for older systems and especially right after the exploits first appear. This is particularly true for those threats that can be delivered as drive-by exploits from ads embedded in otherwise innocent websites. Anything brought onboard your system in the future will represent a possible risk of containing a new exploit, and that risk will only grow as time goes by and your system obsolescence grows. It's unpleasant, but it's reality in the modern digital world.
To keep your risks low, you will have to more than ever practice "safe hex" in where you browse, what (if anything) you download, and what you enable in your browser. If you can, you should disable JavaScript in your browser for your casual browsing, even though it will break a number of sites; enable it only for sites you absolutely trust that have few if any ads. Adspace is normally rented out to other sites that may not have been fully vetted by the hosting website, and are the most common portal for drive-by infections. JavaScript is a scripting language that allows websites to do things on your system, and it can be and is essential to a lot of infection methods.
What you decide to do, is of course up to you and your reasons for doing so. Just recognize the risks involved going forward if you elect to continue with an obsolete system. To reiterate, from here on, preserving system security will be your greatest challenge, unless you simply keep it offline. If system security will be much harder to maintain, then act accordingly in terms of what you do with the system.@blackbird71
What about SP3? -
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A Former User last edited by
Hello, boyoz!
Today is the 4th day my MSE won't update -
Connection Failed.
I wonder if I'm gonna need another antimalware application in place of this, current one: MicroSoft 'pledged' to maintain the Essentials till July this year, so I guess I should move anyway - apart that they may have forgotten their 'pledge', huh? -
blackbird71 last edited by
... Today is the 4th day my MSE won't update - Connection Failed. I wonder if I'm gonna need another antimalware application in place of this, current one: MicroSoft 'pledged' to maintain the Essentials till July this year, so I guess I should move anyway - apart that they may have forgotten their 'pledge', huh?
I've not seen similar problem reports yet from XP/MSE users on other forums where I'd expect to see such reports if those users were running into this. However, given that July is only 6 weeks or so away now, it would probably be wisest to spend your effort seeking alternatives to MSE rather than expending too much time and effort trying to track down the source of any MSE problems. Unless, of course, other software is having similar issues.
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A Former User last edited by
Called our MS hotline today.
They said, first, there'd been no other reports like that, and second, they didn't do tech. support for MSE like that. Suggested I went to someanswers.microsoft.comor like that. Haven't been yet, but it's a week now, and the system says "Ahoy, we're in trouble!" and the MSE obtained a "Out of date" button. Nothing helps - as before.
Well, found some "Microsoft Security Scanner" or something (see the new thread), planning to use it a couple of times till I get some...
The system started getting slowish at times... I wonder if I have a week or something till I'm really in trouble.Shall I uninstall the MSE before installing the replacement?
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blackbird71 last edited by
The general rule of thumb is that you only want one antivirus product running on a system at a time. Many of them have a habit of hooking the OS kernel, demanding certain privileged accesses, and employing anti-tamper techniques that can interfere with one another if more than one AV is wired in. Not all AVs create equal amounts of trouble if others are running (and I don't know about MSE), but my personal practice is always to install a new one only after uninstalling the old one first (and using CCleaner to carefully clean out any registry residue left from uninstalling the old one). I do the uninstall and cleanup fully offline, but because I'm back of a hardware firewall, I do the installation of the new AV online simply because most of the time, it will immediately want to go out for updates or signature files.
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blackbird71 last edited by
CCleaner? Is it necessary?
Not really, probably, for MSE. But some of the other AV products (especially ones like Norton, McAffee, NOD32, and others) can leave behind quite a few fragments when simply uninstalled. In those cases, some users have had issues when installing a new AV afterwards. A lot depends on both the adequacy of the AV's uninstaller program - they're not all created equally well - and the complexity of the 'hooking' the AV installations do in your system. But if you plan on trialing a number of different AV products to arrive at a final choice, the odds are your registry will come to bear the scars of incomplete uninstalling after a time. Whether that creates a problem, of course, depends entirely on what you install and then uninstall and how well the programmers did their jobs. I'd keep something like CCleaner on my system ahead of time "just in case" an AV program's incomplete uninstall messes up installing a new one - BEFORE you have to go out on the Internet "bare" to find a CCleaner (or whatever) copy because you're unable to install a new AV after incompletely uninstalling an old one.
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blackbird71 last edited by
What about a RegScanner? Will it do?
I've never used it, but from its description, it appears to be just a scanner to locate reg keys using various search terms. But if you need to do anything to the located keys, you have to use RegEdit to do it... which sounds like a lot of manual work if there's a lot of affected keys left behind by a poor AV uninstaller. I can't tell how effective it would be at searching out things like CCleaner, which locates "unlinked" or orphaned keys and displays what software names they used to be associated with - all in one pass. But I realize not all tools are for everyone or every system. In any case, in whatever way one elects to remove registry keys via any tools, be sure to back up the registry first and be sure that any key(s) being removed are actually associated by name with the uninstalled software.
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A Former User last edited by
be sure to back up the registry first
What do you mean - every item to remove? -
blackbird71 last edited by
A registry backup is one made either with RegEdit (File > Export) or using a registry cleanup tool that offers a full registry backup feature. If you're going to do surgery on the registry, it's a good idea to have a clean copy saved somewhere to use for recovering, if needed. As a belt-and-suspenders measure, I also use the cleaner's internal tool that saves all reg deletions so they can be merged back in if needed. I'm a believer that you can never have too many backups, preferably made in slightly different ways. I think that dates back to my Win98 days when a drive crash and a chain of other problems left me doing a partially manual drive restoration from my 4th-deep, piecemeal backup... the other 3 kinds of backups all unable to function so as to help with restoration. Without that 4th-deep backup, I'd have totally lost all my data and certain system files which, at the time, would have been a first-order catastrophe for me.
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blackbird71 last edited by
That means a copy made of the registry as it currently stands, before doing any kind of alterations on it. It's intended as an easy way to get back home if your subsequent registry changes cause trouble for your system or software. It's kind of like setting a system restore point before doing a major update to a system. In the case of a registry backup, if you need to, you can restore it and immediately put your registry back exactly like it was before you made any changes.
