How to Make Windows XP Safe (and Fast) (2020)

I was waiting to see what miraculous solution the author had for making Windows XP safe to use, especially since they were adamant that they didn't use sandboxes or VMs. Turns out their safety is just "don't download weird stuff" and "if you care about security you are probably a paranoid loser". So really you should not follow this guide and if you do for heaven's sake do not connect the machine to the internet. You are unlikely to be targeted by a 0-day or even a 1-day but when it comes to 1000+-day vulnerabilities against an OS with barely any security mitigations you are just tempting fate. Don't do this.

There are people who run the latest-updated Windows with all the defaults (including automatic updates) and still manage to get infected by malware or otherwise mess up their system enough to need reinstalled regularly, and then there are people like this (and I know many others) who have no problems with the same system for literally decades.<p>I&#x27;ve long believed that user actions make the biggest difference in security, but because gullible users are easily phished and taken advantage of, both legally and otherwise, it&#x27;s in the companies&#x27; best interests to not encourage users to become aware of that.

His business does virus removal and data recovery.<p>Keep the money flowing, I guess?

Is it really (2020)? This sort of “debloat Windows by disabling random services and tweaking random registry keys” was popular 20 years ago, when spinning rust was the only option, and it was slow spinning rust, alongside a slow CPU. You risk breaking your system for a minor improvement — minor in 2004, but completely not measurable in 2024.<p>Many of the suggestions are just weird, wrong, pointless cargo-cult. And hoping that disabling things in XP can make it secure, or that blocking 4500 websites will protect you from malware.

This guy is very naive if he thinks flicking a few buttons in the UI of his ancient operating system is going to keep him from getting pwt.<p>Edit: might as well provide more info. Windows XP was notorious for its security issues which were fixed in the server version at the time. Even recent versions of Windows have been effected by &#x27;zero-click&#x27; vulns in the TCP&#x2F;IP stack which is about as bad as it gets. MS rated it a 9&#x2F;10 but if all that&#x27;s needed to own a box is sending the right packet then I can&#x27;t imagine what a level 10 vuln looks like.

If you must run XP then run it in a non-networked VM. I can&#x27;t think of any other way you can protect it other than shutting down the VM running XP.

&gt; If you must install XP on a 2TB hard drive, then XP should be the first primary partition, and that partition should be less than 120GB<p>What is the reason for doing this? I use XP for some music software which is more than 120G and requires to be installed in C:&#x2F;

This seems insane. What can you do on Windows XP that can&#x27;t be done better on a modern Linux? (even at the time the article was written)

I stopped reading when I read that Mr Genius here judges computer speed solely based on how quickly his computer boots and shuts down.<p>Objectively, how quickly your computer opens programs and undertakes operations (encoding, decoding, rendering, etc), are far more important than the speed involved in turning it on and off, things which might happen twice a day each.<p>There are also many things that could impact how quickly a PC boots up that don&#x27;t reflect that computer&#x27;s hardware, but honestly crying about boot speeds after about 2013 is crazy - post-Sandy Bridge era processors and memory are all fast enough that you should only have boot speed issues if you are literally doing something wrong.<p>My Windows 11 12700 PC boots in 8 seconds (and that&#x27;s with fast boot OFF).<p>I abhor Windows 11 but acting like Windows XP is a panacea (particularly if the machine is connected to the internet) is as laughable as it is asinine.