running old laptop securely on lan

Discussion in 'other security issues & news' started by david banner, Jan 13, 2010.

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  1. david banner

    david banner Registered Member

    Joined:
    Nov 24, 2007
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    One XP laptop on my lan is 7 years old and is very slow. Because i want to keep it I want to reduce as much as possible to amount of programs starting up and running.

    If I just had an av and firewall and got infected would the infection spread through the blan or would the other pcs be able to block with their security programs

    Any advice as to really reducing it to just surf, what services can be disabled etc appreciated. I set it to display for best performance and so the start menu is pre xp and i removed icons from the screen.
     
  2. innerpeace

    innerpeace Registered Member

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    Jan 15, 2007
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    As long as all your machines have inbound software firewalls and the OS and other programs are up to date then I don't think you have to worry about an infection spreading on your network. You can go to the link in my signature and run an online scan to make sure your important programs and OS are up to date.

    To speed up the old computer you would want to disable any processes running in the background that aren't needed. About the best way to do that is do a search on each process and determine if it's safe to disable.

    If you really want to disable a few services, here is a link that will help. http://www.blackviper.com/

    Step 4 may help in this link: http://home.comcast.net/~SupportCD/OptimizeXP.html Ignore the part about the paging file and prefetch.

    Step 5 mentions Autoruns which can help you disable unneeded apps that start with you computer. You will need to search for these and disable accordingly.

    If you do any of the tweaks, keep a detailed list in case something breaks. You can always reverse the changes. Also, take your time and only make one change at a time. It's much easier to troubleshoot issues when you take your time.
     
  3. david banner

    david banner Registered Member

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    Thanks innerpeace, much appreciated
     
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