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Originally Posted by Blossom
I have this netbook it's a Toshiba NB200 I think. it's a nice netbook but it's has XP which is now obsolete. I don't want to throw it out. There's got to be something I can do with it. Maybe turn it into a Chromebook if possible or something like that.
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I have an old Acer netbook with XP. It's a 32bit machine with a 1.6ghz Atom CPU and a whopping 1.5GB RAM. It's not a candidate for upgrade, because it won't run any later Windows version with acceptable performance.
XP isn't a concern. It has all of the available security patches. I run a software firewall, use a decent browser, and practice Safe Hex. I'm not paranoid about getting hacked.
I actually stopped running A/V software on XP. I had been running Symantec Corporate A/V via an employer site license. It ran like a top and didn't use a lot of resources. But the version I was running reached End-of-Life and would no longer get virus signature updates. I no longer worked for that employer, so a new version would be on my dime. The only things it had ever "caught" had been false positives. I asked myself if I needed to run A/V and concluded I didn't.
Viruses and malware are infections, and infections have vectors by which they enter a host. Ward the vector, and block the infection.
The principal vector for viruses is email. I use Gmail as my email system. I read and reply to it in my browser, and my mail store lives on Google's servers. Gmail has viewers for most common attachment types, so I can view them in my browser and they never reach my machine. And most mail that might contain malicious attachments will be flagged as spam in any case and never hit my Inbox.
And I only download from known good sites that scan on their end, and most of what I get is open source in any case.
I stopped running A/V, and haven't missed it. I warded the vectors.
Malware targets the browser, with IE the biggest target because it was most widely used. I haven't run IE except for odd compatibility tests in years. I run Firefox, and there are an assortment of extensions to make it more secure. I'm also careful about where I go and what I do online. Firefox uses a Google generated blocklist of sites that do things like serve malware, and pops up a warning screen if one is visited.
I have the free Malware Bytes malware scanner. I run it occasionally. It never finds anything. I warded the vector.
The latest version of Firefox requires at least Win7 and won't install on XP, but the Firefox Extended Support Release based on v52 still works and is adequately secure.
I
did set it up to dual boot Ubuntu Linux. Ubuntu runs acceptably on the limiter hardware. I chose it because it does the best job I've seen in a Linux distro of figuring out what hardware it's running on, setting itself up, and Just Working. The Lubuntu distribution using the lightweight Lxde desktop provides acceptable performance.
Firefox Quantum
does run on it, and things like Libre Office provide the capabilities I get under Windows.
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My desktop is Vista and that's now obsolete. I had to find a browser that will work on it. I don't know how much longer things will continue to work on it. Dropbox is suppose to stop at the end of year working on Vista why junk something that still works perfectly? Ugh!
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Because it will stop working perfectly? I sympathize, but technology is a moving target. For the most part, you
can't sit still.
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Dennis