Windows XP 8th April

[Enrique]

Good morning ,
The big day is nearly here, but don't panic your beloved XP system will not stop working.
You're not alone the UK Government( ie Tax payers money ) has shelled out £5m to have its systems maintained for another year.................they have had seven years warning of EOS (end of support).

The final patches are out on Tuesday.

Some light reading..........
http://www.expertreviews.co.uk/software ... ll-updates

So what to do............

1) Use a supported Browser.......Palemoon... Firefox.... Chrome

2) Use a two way Fire Wall..........Zonealarm and read the popups to allow/deny

3) Keep your Anti Virus up to date........Avast... Avg... Bitdefender

Avast also has a Critical Software checker that will tell you if third-party software is out of date.

4) Pour another Rioja and wonder what all the fuss is about..............

Should you have any issues please post as I've some XP systems that I can get my hands on......

[poppylou]

Thanks, Enrique.

My biggest worry is am I still covered for any fraud for on-line banking (all this small print that gets sent out in the post, changing terms and conditions)?, but I guess that is a bigger problem for the financial institutions than it should be for me.

[Enrique]

Hi poppylou,
You will be ok if you keep your Anti-virus up to date.
At least Avast is good there as you have that annoying woman telling you its been updated.
Others you have to manually check.

You should be doing this weekly............running, after updating Malwarebytes and CCleaner

Have a decent Firewall........like Zonealarm...........

And you will be good to go.............

[Terry Tibbs]

Another step that will help to protect all Windows users (not just those continuing to use XP) is to ensure that the account you normally use is set up as a 'limited' user and not an 'administrator'. This will stop a majority of malware from being able to access the sensitive parts of the operating system.

If you only have one user account (typically it might be your name from when you originally set up Windows), and if this is still set up as an administrator, go to the Windows control panel and firstly create a new account of type administrator. Give it a different password to the one you normally use (if you have one), and keep that password somewhere safe and secure. Then edit your normal user account properties and make it a 'Limited' type. (in Windows 7 it's called a Standard User, but it's basically the same thing).

The only downside with doing this is that you'll need to enter your administrator account password when updating programs, etc. But a report I saw recently claimed that the vast majority of vulnerabilities fixed in Windows updates are not effective unless the account running is an administrator type.

The comment in the article about disabling (or ideally removing) Java is very relevant too. Note, we're talking about the Java program here (now provided by Oracle), not JavaScript, which is something different entirely. If you have it installed and don't know why, try removing it and see if anything breaks. If you do need to reinstall it to make one or more programs work, be sure to disable or remove the Java plugin from your browser(s). And also, be sure to keep Java updated. But if possible, I'd remove Java altogether.

[Mowser]

Microsoft will continue releasing virus protection for Windows XP through its Security Essentials application until 14 July 2015..