silent running

One for the techy experts I think. I just spent the weekend getting my dual boot XP home / XP pro system up and running again after a major hard drive crash. In case you're wondering, one OS runs like a normal home PC, the other boots into a totally pared down OS which runs as a dedicated audio workstation.

Anyway, I'm still waiting for my replacement hard drive to come back, and the install I'm running on my spare drive at the moment is pretty basic, so it'll be no hardship to start a totally clean install and just copy over My Documents etc when the replacement turns up.

So I've got two questions: 1. Do I hang on and wait for Vista in a month's time or stick with a nice stable XP system that I know works. Athlon XP 3200+/1 gig of 400MHz RAM/250 gig hard drive etc.

2. My system runs through a 'BT Hub' router. I always used free Zone Alarm as firewall and Norton for AV. But I'm fed up with Norton and I'm beginning to question whether I actually need a firewall now that Windows Defender is in effect anyway. Plus because of the now standard features of the latest Outlook Express, IE7, Thunderbird and Firefox, all these aftermarket anti-spam/anti-phishing/anti-popup guards are pretty much pointless programs sapping my computer aren't they? Might as well just stick with the built in stuff? My plan is to just run a basic AV program on either XP or Vista and use the built in firewall.

BTW I've been using and building PC's since the early 90's. It's just the last few years worth of Windows releases I just don't have the time or inclination to get involved with how they work. Actually I think once Windows first had a registry, that's when it became too much bother to tweak myself!

Help!

mike1210

Run Anti-virus on all the operating systems you use, the home hub will have a firewall though I hate those things with a passion (used one or two), the firewall on the Home Hub should prevent people from directly accessing your machine, see the video below for an explanation of hardware firewalls

http://www.draytek.co.uk/natmovie.html

it's usually more complaicated than that (state tables etc) but it's a good guide.

Id install XP for now then Vista in due course, for audio apps and the like check for compatibility problems on Vista and up to date drivers for sound cards etc, Vista on my machine takes up 700 meg of RAM with nothing running so with a 1 gig of memory it may limit you a little

For Anti-Virus i'd go for Nod32, Kasperspy and Trend are worth checking out also. Avoid free ones such as AVG and the like.

Software firewalls.... The windows one is decent enough, or use Zone alarm if you wish, Zone alarm will monitor outgoing traffic also. Windows defender monitors spyware and isn't a firewall

Chris L

What Mike says really. Don't ever consider running without a firewall. All sorts of nasrty things that will try and have a go at you if you don't. It's not worth the hassle to be honest.

As regards Vista - you know what they say about running v1.0 of anything (especially Microsoft...)

If you have a nice stable environment on XP and have no actual requirement to run Vista, then I would be inclined to wait a while.

jaytc2003

iTrader: (1)

I disagree with Mike, some of the free antivirus are okay and dont hog all your system resources. I use Avast on my laptop and AVG on my desktop (or the other way around) they more or less autoupdate themselves on a daily basis and I have had no problems with either, I also use zonealarm and a router firewall.

For Vista, I agree with Chris, probably wont bother with it myself until svs pack 1 comes out. I have an upgrade voucher that I got with MCE 2005 but wont use it until the last minute, also I think from what I have read, that an XP3200+ may struggle with it as well

Iain Young

No they're not, (seem to have had this discussion before )

InvisibleMan

Dont take any notice of those vista advisor programs, an XP3200+ will be fine, as long as you have 1Gb memory and a fairly decent dx9 graphics card

silent running

OK thanks for the advice so far. I'm not really proposing to run without a firewall at all - what I want to confirm is that the standard Windows firewall and running through a router will make a further layer of software firewall redundant? The less software I can get away with, the better IMHO.

What it is, is I love the way my audio workstation OS runs. It runs like a dream, there's absolutely no flab on that system at all - it just flies along. Then when I boot back into my normal 'home' OS it just seems so clunky in comparison.

I definitely wouldn't think of using Vista for my audio system. But the home system was more what I was thinking of, and from the sounds of it, I think I'll hold off until the first SP comes out then. Although I'm sure my box is capable of running it - I had one of the Beta versions on and the Aero stuff worked fine. The shocking thing was how loads of my peripherals didn't work though.

Time to focus on what I want to know:
Will the combination of Windows Firewall and a hardware router be sufficient firewall protection, in XP?
Any more good alternatives to Norton AV? - I don't want no parental controls, anti-spyware, instant messaging protection etc, just a basic program that works and if it doesn't hog resources and is totally free, even better.

Iain Young

When you install a software firewall, it actually runs instead of the windows firewall, and so you are not really using any extra resources. Most of the 3rd party firewalls are much better than the windows firewall. The windows one only stops incoming messages, not outgoing. So if you get infected with something that starts transmitting stuff over the internet, windows firewall will not stop it.

As mentioned above. It will stop incoming stuff, but not outgoing if you get infected with something.

Many people on here will say AVG is fine, but in reality there is no free virus checker that does a decent job. You'd be much better off looking at something like kapersky, panda etc (which are much better than Norton and McAfee as far as resource usage is concerned, and they do a much better job of stopping nasty critters than the free ones).

p.s. if you gt an anti-virus, it might be worth checking it's compatibility if you want to install vista...

silent running

Great that's everything I want to know. Many thanks to all!