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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?)."
vmware is free, so is virtualbox and xen.
you would create the image yourself.
install a default XP machine and run IE on it.
They're using their grammar skills there.
I review software for a living (in addition to doing other things) so I've been using virtualized Windows XP installations for awhile now. (I prefer Virtualbox, but you can do this with any utility)
A long time ago, I created a virtual hard disk image of a Windows XP installation, got it the way I like it, and then backed it up. (storing a few GB long-term is trivial these days) When the current disk image I'm using gets overly cluttered after a few weeks or months, I just get rid of it and load a fresh copy from my backup and start over.
You could probably benefit from the same system.
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
Why would this make you cringe from a security standpoint? Security is only a problem with nefarious things are intended. The act of allowing these specific ActiveX controls to run within the context of the training courses has no bearing on whether or not you are permitting other ActiveX controls to run. If the prompts annoy you, rather than simply completely turning off ActiveX security features, you should add this site to your list of Trusted Sites.
There's nothing inherently wrong with enabling IE, using IE, or using ActiveX. And within the context of this single site there's not likely to be a problem. After all, if they were using their software for malicious deeds you surely have legal rights on your side.
It's available for XP and Vista (32 bit) free from Microsoft: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/sharedaccess/default.mspx
Reading slashdot one-liner: (irm http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot).rdf.item | fl title,desc*
require you to turn off your firewall and pop-up blocker. Why they cannot write web software to work without needing pop-ups and can work with firewalls is beyond me.
Virtual PC 2007 is free. Use Pricewatch's operating system price search to find a version of Windows to run under it. Windows XP can be bought in OEM version for under $100.
Run all college web sites in a virtual machine.
Use Avast Home for Antivirus as it is free for home and non-profit use.
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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!
-=[You cannot consistently judge this statement to be true.]=-
Just get some sandboxing software (i.e. "sandboxie", which I've only heard good stuff about) and run internet explorer from within such a sandboxed environment.
Just like a VM it will keep IE (or anything spawned by IE) from messing with the rest of the system, but with the advantage that it is much more lightweight than a typical VM.
Windows 2000 is not out of support. It is, in fact, still supported under the "Extended Support" model, where security fixes are still produced. It has left the mainstream support model where tech support was free. The difference between mainstream and extended is that you must pay for tech support calls instead of them being free.
According to this, Extended support doesn't end until July 13, 2010.
Bill
It's my Sig and you can't have it. Mine! All Mine!