Harden XP system - how and with what

Feel free to mention this to a boxer. lol.
Hugger

 

Hardening would typically involve turning off unnecessary services and features, and changing insecure defaults. e.g. turning off Autorun, creating the My Computer zone for IE and setting its security level to maximum, disabling network shares if you don't need them... That sort of thing.

There are a bunch of applications that can help with it. IMHO the best (and the ones I use ) are these:

Seconfig XP for closing ports
SafeXP for disabling stuff you don't need
Security & Privacy Complete for disabling even more stuff you don't need and tweaking Firefox settings

These are *not* HIPS or anti-executable applications, and do not replace such; they just make it harder to exploit common vulnerabilities in Windows.

 

Did you read the OP's post ?

 

Yes, I did.

 

right ..

So can you see why people suggested applications ?

 

No, I cannot.

 

Wildest is right when he says, hardening means removing vulnerabilities in the system itself, not adding software to improve it.

removing vulnerabilities normally involves making changes in the system registry this is done with certain tools like G1111 mentioned before ie the same tools in my sig.

hardening is not done by installing other software apps.

 

I never said it was.
I said read the OP's post.

 

Thank you.. will harden first by removing vulnerabilities, then look into anti-executable ... but need to educate myself first..

Regards

 

Try Geswall free. It now has almost exactly the same functionality as the paid for version. The only thing it lacks is the same alert warnings. It will harden your system immeasurably and you won't even notice it's there except when you download a file and it puts a little symbol on the icon to let you know it's potentially unsafe. A great program and amazing for a free product.

 

While this is technically correct, the level of protection you can gain by "hardening" your system is very low. You could spend weeks "hardening " your system and you still wouldn't have a fraction of the protection you would get by just installing something like Geswall. I can't understand why anyone would bother given that Geswall is free and it's practically invisible to the user. I would just recommend installing Geswall, switch off notifications and forget about it. Your system will be pretty "hardened" by doing this alone.

 

cool idea sounds great

 

1 - what kind of game has a computer get MS Anti-virus?

2- basically you are a parent who doesn't want to support parent' s job, aren't you?

Sure there is no workaround? Since when a parent gives more importance to the game than to the security? Strange.

You are the father. you therefore are the admin. Do your job, or stop crying.

Sorry if I am too direct. But this subject is definitely not a technical problem, nor a tool problem.