Securing XP
I have a number of computers all tied to a local area network with all of them capable of accessing the internet. Most recently this included my best computer an Athlon +1800.
I use the Athlon for my ham radio activities and it serves as a digital mode interface as well as a TV receiver and multimedia machine.
To make it work as well as possible as a multimedia machine I was finally forced to install XP.
XP must open a huge conglomeration of useless servers because a simple installation including SP1 and SP2 results in 21 processes hard at work trying to use all the cpu cycles my machine can provide. They are useless because I don’t know what they do and Microsoft is not willing to tell me. My guess is that most of them are data miners that have no business being there.
Recently I discovered that the ham radio computer does not need to have internet access. Furthermore, It does not need access to the LAN. It can do its job very well as a stand alone ham radio dedicated machine. File sharing is done with a portable WD Passport.
So, after doing a clean re-installation of XP I now have it running as a stand alone. The only way it can access the outside world it through the radio.
That prevents me from getting automatic updates on application and systems software, but I never felt comfortable allowing folk of questionable trustworthiness unrestricted access to my computer with no questions asked.
Some may say that is a bad idea. It will not allow security updates and may make the system less secure. Not so. I have no need to protect this system from a security standpoint because it is not connected to the internet.
Besides, folk who sell faulty software demonstrate a complete disregard for their customers. Would you allow such people unlimited and unsupervised access to anything you own?
My guess is that I now own the most secure XP system in the entire world without need for updates automatic or otherwise.