Windows Security and On-line Training Courses?

eggegick writes "My wife has taken a number of college courses over the last three years and many of the classes used on-line materials rather than books. The problem was these required IE along with Java, Active X and/or various plug-ins (the names of which escapes me), and occasionally I'd have to tweak our firewall to allow these apps to run. I don't think any of these training apps would work with Firefox. All of this made me cringe from a security point of view. Myself, I use Firefox, No-Script, our external firewall and common sense when using the web. I have a very old Windows 2000 machine that I keep up to date. To my knowledge, I've never had a virus or malware problem. Her computer is a relatively new XP machine, and at this point she feels her computer has something wrong. But now she prefers to use my old machine instead of hers since it seems to be more responsive. We plan to run the recovery disk on hers. Assuming the college course work applications were part of the cause, what recommendations do any of you have for running this kind of software? Is there a VMware solution that would work — that is, have a Windows image that is used temporarily for the course work and then discarded at the end of the semester (and how do you create such an image, and what does it cost?)."

Comments

Windows SteadyState

[benjymouse]

is also an option. Can completely lock down a PC. All changes are written to a separate "log" partition which can be reverted. Logs can be kept separate for individual users and the system. For instance you can configure Windows SteadyState to discard all user changes at each boot but allows the system to update itself through Windows Update

It's available for XP and Vista (32 bit) free from Microsoft: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/sharedaccess/default.mspx

Can't you just fix the problem?

[diggitzz]

Virtualization is easy, but non-virtualization is even easier. There is a VMWare solution that will work: It's VMWare, and it works exactly like you think it does. The current price is listed on the VMWare website. I don't understand why this is a community-posed question, though, since you seem to have answered yourself in the question.

The free solution, on the other hand, is to just clean up the problems on the XP machine. If the other machines on the network continue to run trouble-free, just fix the one with trouble. You probably don't even need to recover or reinstall. Uninstall the ActiveX components, close the firewall back up, run anti-virus and anti-spyware apps (at least 3 different free ones) to remove anything that might have shown up, and if there are less than a handful of problems detected, you don't really need to reinstall. Run msconfig to check for extra crap at startup, and use HijackThis to check for any remaining browser toolbars, add-ons or other crap you don't want. Then make Firefox the default browser. Incidentally, there is a Firefox add-on available called IETabs which lets you run an IE-specific webpage from Firefox without starting IE and all its add-ons (it does use the base IE rendering engine tho).

If the machine hasn't had a fresh XP install in over a year, then it's time to reinstall anyway, and the sluggishness might have little to do with the extra ActiveX crap your wife had to use.

A cleanup might take you 2 hours. A reinstall could take longer, depending on how organized you and your wife have been about backing up data and how many programs you'll need to reinstall. VMWare works, but isn't free. These are the considerations to balance. Good Luck!