Antimalware, firewall, and other security programs for Windows XP working in 2023 and hopefully beyond

[Dave-H]

Thanks @Tangy.
I would be interested to know your results.

Just an update, I spoke again today to Panda's technical support people at AnyTech365.
Again, really friendly and helpful people, who knew exactly what I was talking about.

They are thinking, as many here do, that Panda have actually withdrawn support for XP.
They agree that doing this by just breaking the legacy version of Panda Dome, is not a good way of doing this, especially for paying customers, and they are trying to find out whether this really is the case or whether this has been done accidentally and will be fixed, if indeed it's possible to do that.

There has certainly been no change made to the system requirements on Panda's website, and the article trumpeting its XP compatibility claims to have been updated on July 1st.

They have given me a number to ring for Watchguard, Panda's parent company, so I will try giving them a ring tomorrow to see what they say about this.

[Tangy]

@AstroSkipper I mean RAM. I got 8 GBs. MY xp reads around 3 GBs. There is something that my system does not like about it. I have not put any effort to find out what is causing that. Could it be that my xp is 32bits ?

[AstroSkipper]

It’s clear and obvious that Panda stopped supporting Windows XP for programme updates quite some time ago. The latest version is 22.03.05, nearly one year ago, and that was a long time ago. But to then go and break even that version via the automatic update – that’s a no-go.  And in doing so put the user’s partition at risk. 

[AstroSkipper]

Long story short, I have revived Comodo Antivirus 12.0.0.6818 (CAV) as part of the Comodo Internet Security suite (CIS) since it was no longer wirking out of the box. It's one of the last working antimalware programmes with real-time protection, HIPS, VirusScope, secure containmenr, online definition updates, even incremental definition updates, and the possibility of offline updating. This is now my new antimalware programme.  And Vir.IT of course. All free of charge.

Edited 6 hours ago by AstroSkipper

[AstroSkipper]

34 minutes ago, Tangy said:

@AstroSkipper I mean RAM. I got 8 GBs. MY xp reads around 3 GBs. There is something that my system does not like about it. I have not put any effort to find out what is causing that. Could it be that my xp is 32bits ?

Of course, only there is a limit of RAM memory size.

Edited 5 hours ago by AstroSkipper
corrected

[Dave-H]

25 minutes ago, AstroSkipper said:

It’s clear and obvious that Panda stopped supporting Windows XP for programme updates quite some time ago. The latest version is 22.03.05, nearly one year ago, and that was a long time ago. But to then go and break even that version via the automatic update – that’s a no-go.  And in doing so put the user’s partition at risk. 

Yes indeed, but if you remember, Malwarebytes did pretty much the same thing.
They maintained version 3.5.1 for several years 'as is' for XP users and still provided pattern updates for it.
Then they pulled the plug, without any warning, and no longer provided pattern updates, although the program still worked OK.
Likewise, Panda keep 22.03.05 as their legacy version for XP users, which can still be downloaded and installed.
As long as it still works, I'm not that worried if the program files are old.

This is not quite the same scenario, of course, as Panda doesn't use local pattern files for scanning, which makes it even stranger that they would suddenly break XP compatibility.
Whatever they do with the daily 'synchronisation' mechanism, it seems that has broken things. No program files have been changed as far as I can see.

 

[AstroSkipper]

3 minutes ago, Dave-H said:

as Panda doesn't use local pattern files for scanning

At the moment, I am very satisfied with CAV and Vir.IT as both use offline definition files. Comodo's definition file base.cav is nearly 640 MB in size and therefore much pattern inside. 

[AstroSkipper]

But if anyone now thinks that Comodo actively supports Windows XP, they are very much mistaken.  This company is still advertising Windows XP compatibility, specifically here https://antivirus.comodo.com/security/windows-xp-free-antivirus.php, but for years now, the installer provided has no longer been compatible with XP. It’s completely misleading and simply sloppy. Now it’s down entirely to the creativity of Windows XP users to breathe new life into old, discontinued versions. And exactly that was what I did. 

Edited 1 hour ago by AstroSkipper