OK. Now something else. I noticed your sign states XP SP2. Is there any
special reason you don't run Windows XP SP3?
I do run SP3 on some of my computers. I've been running Windows since
'93 and I never have been infected with a virus or a trojan yet. But I
have worked on and cleaned up many other computers that have been
infected. And I always believed that if you didn't update your
computers, that your computer would become a malware magnet.
That is until 2008. When I got into the netbook craze and bought an Asus
EeePC 701 with a 4GB SSD soldered on the motherboard. It came with XP
SP2 and only had 200MB of free space. I could delete some of the stuff,
but not enough to fit SP3 on this machine. So I figured it would get
infected.
A year later, nothing at all. And it worked great. Since I have dozens
of computers here. I started experimenting with about 6 of them and
stopped updating them. None of those ever got infected either. In fact,
the ones that were still getting updates were having stability problems
and .NET update trouble. The ones that weren't, ran just like they did
since day one.
I do use some hotfixs, which address a particular problem. But it
doesn't make a lot of sense installing hotfixs that has nothing to do
with your machine, but people do everyday. Malware hasn't bothered me
over the decades, but updates that has gone wrong has.
