lucid717

I stay a few generations behind to get things on the cheap. Since I still use XP Pro SP3 x86 I have no need for a high end machine. I have two Dell Inspiron 530's that I got for next to nothing. Both have Core2Duo CPU's, one an E8300 and an ATI Radeon 3650 video card. I connect it to my TV via HDMI. I don't play new PC games, pretty much retro and it's plenty sufficient. And watch Youtube videos and whatnot. And use it for other multimedia. It has a Wireless AC 1750 network adapter. Router is a Netgear R6300v2. 4 GB of RAM (1GBx4), and is upgradable to 8 GB so even if I upgrade to a 64-bit OS the boxes are plenty sufficient for it. The other has an E8400 and just onboard video & sound, hardwired to the router. I use this one for browsing and general use. And I also have a Dimension 3000 that I used for years until I recently got these Inspiron's. Has a Celeron CPU @ 2.4 Ghz and 2 GB of RAM. I just use it as pretty much a retro gaming console in a gaming room, offline. And to convert/burn stuff. And as a word processor, I do some writing on it. Then I have an old laptop, an Inspiron 4100. It has a Pentium III CPU @ 1.2 ghz I believe, that's the best it can use. And 1 GB of RAM, and a wireless card. I have emulators and retro games on it too, and music/VLC. And do some writing on it too. It runs XP well enough as stripped down as I have it. I do have 1 nice toy though/exception. I treated myself to a Dell Precision M6800 Mobile Workstation. It has a Core i5 CPU @ 2.7 Ghz and 16 GB of RAM @ 1866 Mhz, and an nVidia Quardro 2200 video card w/ 2 GB RAM... hardly high end but sufficient enough. Didn't feel like playing a grand more. Again I don't play newer games really. And runs on a Samsung 850 EVO mSATA SSD. Wireless AC 1750 WLAN Mini-Card. 2 more ports for regular SSD's. It's the only nice computer I've really ever owned. I do everything on it really, but love hooking it up to my 47" LED TV via HDMI and playing retro emulators/games on it. NES & Genesis games never looked so good. I run Win7 Ultimate on that mSATA chip. I have another one I swap in & out with XP Pro SP3 and Debian in a VM on it... a setup I use for more sensitive type stuff. And also have an EMachines ETower 500is laying around. A 500 Mhz CPU and 256 MB of RAM with 98SE on it. But it pretty much just collects dust. It was my first computer. I have been thinking lately about using it for something though.

These are 2 problem ports that hang open and "listen in", if you've ever looked at FW logs/connection lists. I always like to harden and sure up things at the point of attack first instead of just relying on 3'rd party software to stealth ports. This way if an app failed to fire up properly at boot, or sometimes a router isn't working properly but you're oblivious to it because it's not in an obvious way. Like you may have internet connectivity but it's not stealthing ports properly. Anyhow, this is how you do it: Run regedt32 (Port 445) Go to: HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\NetBT Locate the "Start" entry (DWORD value). Modify value from 1 to 4 Find "Parameters" entry in NetBT. Erase the "\Device\" value, leaving the field blank. (Port 135) Disable the Services: DCOM, COM+ Event System, COM+ System Application, System Event Notification ... You'll have to restart your computer to for DCOM to "Stop" Run regedt32 Go to: HKLM\Software\Microsoft\OLE Locate the entry "EnableDCOM". Modify the value to "N". Now Go to: HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Rpc Right click & modify the value named "DCOM Protocols" Under the "Value Data" you will see several values, starting with "ncacn". Delete them all, leaving field blank Close registry editor. Reboot computer. Ports 135 & 445 should be closed now. Run the cmd "netstat -an" to see that those ports are no longer listening. You can go ahead and turn those services back on again if you want to. It won't break anything, just close those ports. But really you don't need any of them except DCOM if you want to use the integrated defragmenter, or to update windows.

The Core 2 Duo E8000 line are great CPU's that hold up well even today. I have two of them, an E8300 and an E8400 in two Inspiron 530's I have. They are more durable than Quad Core's, which I've heard tons of stories of them burning out. And what sets the E8K line apart from the other Core 2 Duo CPU's, other than the speed, is the integrated features on them. That may not mean a lot to some people, but it's HUGE to me. They not only have VT-x, known as hardware virtualization that applies to memory isolation. But also VT-d, which is for I/O (CPU isolation) and lends a huge hardware/speed assist along with security for running VM's. Not only do no other Core2Duo's have this feature, but even many Core i3 & i5 CPU's lack it. And I actually think it's more important than EPT (extended page tables). And they also have Trusted Execution Technology, which again even most i3's & i5's lack. And this feature is necessary to utilize TPM. i7's have it all though... and the kitchen sink. But Core 2 Duo E8K CPU's are IMO the best pound for pound so to speak processors, and were ahead of their time when new.

XP Pro SP3 is my favorite OS of all time, and I will continue to use it until at least 2019. I do not use IE 8... other than searching for WU's. I use Firefox, and an old version (27.0.1). Everything went downhill when Australis was introduced. I haven't yet applied all the POSr updates yet... that remains to be seen. But based on everything I've read I do not foresee any problems there.

I still use Comodo FW/D+ v 5.10... it's my favorite. Of course I love the HIPS. If I only wanted an outbound FW I'd probably use v3 too, or something else entirely, like LooknStop or Kerio 2.1.5 (great legacy apps). But I could do without the sandboxing module in it. I disable it. And products having useless bloat I don't want/need is a pet peeve of mine. It's also why I can't stand most AV's these days. My ideal AV was something like Avira Free in the v5-6 days. Just a resident file scanner and nothing else... exactly what an AV should be, and all it needs to be. I can't stand these bloated AV's with all these modules, or "shields" I don't need and that other apps I have can do a better job at. And don't like/trust the cloud either. That and don't like putting all my eggs in one proverbial basket, and like a layered approach. So no suites for me. But you just can't find AV's like that anymore. Emsisoft, to it's credit is about the closest thing I've found these days. It's pretty light and basic. I don't use any real-time AV at all on XP Pro SP3. I run Firefox sandboxed, and any new downloads go to a dedicated, isolated partition that's also sandboxed. And I'll scan it with VT Hash Check and/or Malwarebytes Free before unsandboxing it. VT Hash Check is a great app IMO. I also figured out a way to get it to automatically scan downloads in Firefox in tandem with an add-on "Download Statusbar". If you go to VT Hash Check's site, boredomsoft(dot)org, on the main page there's a link to the thread I created at Wilders telling you how to do it. Of course it only scans files up to 32 or 64 MB, so for things larger I use MBAM Free. Or do a full scan with Hitman Pro to get around it's file size limit when doing a shell scan. Those are the 3 AV's I use, and also have TDSS Killer & GMER to periodically check for rootkits. But nothing realtime. On the Win7 Ultimate x86 setup I have on a Mobile Workstation I am in the process of choosing a real-time AV though, because I don't feel confident that I can lock it down the way I can XP. I mean my XP setup is so stripped down, hardened like crazy. And with LP/GP tweaks, default deny SRP, running LUA with tight folder permissions. Restricted sandboxes for anything internet facing. Paranoid D+ also a default deny approach there. And in Firefox hardened about:config like crazy along with NoScript, RequestPolicy, ABE, etc... Also added Malwarebytes Anti-Exploit recently and figured out how to get it to integrate with Sandboxie. And even if something managed to bypass all those measures all I'd have to do is reboot my computer anyhow, and/or boot from a clean image. I just don't see a need for a real-time AV. I think they, more than any other piece of software, add footprint to a setup. And Web Scanning especially does. But I'm leaning toward Emsisoft if I had to pick one.

Thanks, there is great discussion here and I look forward to engaging in it. I also used belong to Wilders but don't post there as often anymore... using older OS's is generally frowned upon more there and discussing it will often lead to arguments. I used 98SE for a long time, until XP SP2, and then have been using that ever since. Well SP3 now. I stay behind a few generations in hardware too to get things cheaper. Not to mention sticking with 32-bit for the time being and on XP there's no use having current gen hardware. I only recently bought a Dell Inspiron 530 on EBay for next to nothing with a Core2Duo E8400 CPU in it. I wanted that model mainly for the hardware virtualization to make running VM's smoother. And has 4 GB of RAM (1GBx4), but is upgradable to 8 gigs so even if I upgrade my OS I feel that hardware is perfectly capable of handling it. Before that I had a Dimension 3000 with a 2.4 Ghz Celeron CPU & 2 GB of RAM for ages. I am migrating to SSD's though, for the speed increase and they're quiet.

I use XP Pro SP3 x86. All of the updates said they were for both POSready & WEPOS... is that okay? Thanks for responding.

Okay I figured it out. Some Local Policy tweak I made was thwarting me. After that I set Automatic Updates to download updates automatically but let me choose when to install them. Within minutes of doing this it began downloading updates. First just 1, the one that is basically just the update to make WU work. Then a second time it downloaded a bunch, over 100 updates. I installed them then rebooted. But then after the reboot it wasn't working that way anymore. So I disabled Automatic updates and checked manually (using Windows Updates, not Microsoft Updates), and it worked. After installing all the WU's I wanted and rebooting I then applied the POSReady registry tweak and rebooted. Then I manually ran WU again, and viola... I see like 33 updates for POS Ready & WEPOS. But now my dilemma is which ones do I install? I thought I recalled reading a post in here where someone said not to install POS Ready & WEPOS updates, but only Server 2003 updates. Well... I didn't see a single Server 2003 update listed. They were all POS Ready + WEPOS updates. So if I read that post correctly that renders this tweak moot. Or do I have it backwards?... to install the POS Ready & WEPOS updates but not the Server 2003 ones? To make a long story short (too late)... which of those 33 or so listed updates should I install? There were like 3 optional ones too. Should I install all of them? Are there any I should avoid? Much appreciated.

I recently bought a SSD and want to do a fresh install of XP Pro on it. It's a Dell, and I have an XP Pro SP3 Dell reinstallation disc to use. But when I went to use Windows Update it said it no longer worked for XP or 2003, much to my chagrin. I tried using the POSReady tweak, creating a .reg file and merging it into my registry as I read to do, but it still didn't work. So did they do something to thwart this tweak now? Or maybe it doesn't work on a fresh install? Maybe there's a new tweak now that does work? I tried looking around this site but the info. was all spread around and it was hard to follow, and much of it was dated, like a year or more old. So I was hoping maybe someone could give me some current info. here in this thread and help me out here. I know that for awhile using Windows Update manually didn't work, but if you set Automatic Updates up to download them automatically it did work. But that didn't seem to work now either, though I admit I didn't give it much time, I was impatient. Does this work? Anyhow I'd really like to be able to run XP Pro SP3 (with all patches) on this SSD. I'd be much obliged if someone could give me some pointers on how I can make this happen. Thanks for your time and attention. Oh, and I'd rather not have to use Microsoft Update. I don't need it. But I will if I have to. And I saw one possible remedy that includes using some software to find updates but it requires .NET Framework to work, which I absolutely loathe with a passion. I find it very bloaty.

I actually had an account here before, but I had a long hiatus and forgot my login info. so created a new one. I covet XP Pro and can't stand any MS OS made since. I want to use it as long as possible but they're making it exceeding difficult to do so now... which is a problem I'm going to get into in a thread in the appropriate place shortly here.