Paging Monster, Filliam H. Muffman and other XP experts

[space-time]

First, thanks to all for your good advice.

I nuked and paved, that things was amazingly virus free (it had Norton installed), but many people installed and removed programs and it was a mess, and the HD had bad sectors.

Artie67 sent me a "new" HD from a 2009 MacBook and I had a Dell XP SP2 which I installed, I installed all the drivers from dell, no ugly yellow questions marks in Device manages, and all works fine.

So I am running XP Pro SP 2 with 1 GB of Ram (some of which is shared for video I guess, only 896 available).

I installed FireFox, Safari + Quicktime, Flash (they probably want to watch youtube sometimes) and now I am downloading Open Office (they probably lost the MS Office teacher edition disk)

Monsted have me excellent advice in the previous threads (about 3 weeks ago), Malwarebytes, avast, gmer come to mind. Should I install all those to keep the computer protected, or Microsoft Essentials would be good enough? how about AVG Free?

Again, the computer had a new HD, there is no virus (yet), so it's not a question about how to disinfect it, but how to protect it from now on.

One thing is sure: if they install that Norton crap from comcast, I will never touch this again.

Thanks, and have a good night (almost 2 AM here, this crap took me too long already. Tomorrow I give it back)

[Black]

I used my XP mini-10v fairly regularly for close to 2 years and managed to avoid any virii-- the worst that happened was pesky applications that tried to take over the browser. I would go into the program files and trash enough of Internet Explorer that it can never launch. And then maybe a few pop-up blocker type add-ons for Firefox.

[Filliam H. Muffman]

I would install the SP3 update* and then run Windows Update again and install all the important security patches.

*this should require the validation tool to be downloaded and run.

Avira had the best results in the most recent test but it is not the easiest to use. AVG and Avast had similar slightly lower ratings. AVG will frequently bog down an old computer with the default settings.

[space-time]

yeah, I already validated windows (check Windows Genuine advantage or something like that). I am surprised it worked, since this XP CD came with another Dell laptop. I didn't even have to enter a key or anything.

I just finished installing SP3 and will install MS Essentials later