I’ve been a lifelong Apple and Mac user. I’ve used some Windows computers in college, but I’ve never owned one. I’ve just come into possession of a Compaq Presario 2100 laptop. All my personal stuff is on my Mac, but I could probably use a laptop for school; I’ve had some trouble in college courses due to not being able to use the same software the prof was using.
As far as I can tell, it’s of about the same vintage as my G4 Emac, although it uses faster 333mhz PC-2700 RAM as opposed to the 133-mhz RAM of my Mac. It has one card with 256MB, and an extra slot. Also it came with an external wireless card of some sort. It has Windows XP installed.
I don’t know anything about dealing with viruses and all; that’s the main reason I stayed with Macs last time. This computer was owned by a teenager, and they gave it away because it was too slow. Just opening a browser and such, it seems extremely sluggish. For all I know, it could already be corrupted with malware, but then again it might just be slow or need more RAM. It appears to have some sort of antivirus software installed but it says it’s out of date.
What do I need to know about running Windows and protecting myself from viruses? Also, any thoughts on how capable it is or what it’s good for?
Did you get the Compaq restore CDs along with the system? If so, try wiping the hard drive and reinstalling XP, although you’ll also need to reinstall the drivers. Also make sure to install service pack 2 and all Windows updates to date. Once you do that, it shouldn’t be sluggish at all, although it will perform better if you add memory (and a gigabyte shouldn’t cost more than fifty bucks).
You could do a wipe and reinstall, if you have the install media. Windows machines do tend to get crufty and unstable after a few years of use, particularly if they’ve had things installed and uninstalled, etc.
Or you could install some flavour of Linux on it - you’ll find that a closer user experience to the Mac, and it will run better than Windows on older hardware like that, and you won’t have to worry about malware.
256MB is barely enough to run a clean Windows XP install and one or two smallish applications simultaneously. 512MB is OK, 1GB is plenty. With enough memory, that model should still be fine for day-to-day duties.
You’re biggest problem will be all the crap that is installed on it, due to the previous owner no doubt running with administrator privileges. Not necessarily malware or viruses - just cruft that installs itself if it is able to. Hardware vendors love to include supposedly helpful utilities with their products, which in reality are often buggy and bloated and just slow your system down. Sometimes these things show up as little icons in the system tray (the row of icons in the lower right hand corner of the screen) - if the system tray extends halfway across the screen, that is a bad sign.
An experienced Windows user could clear out that and other cruft and set you up as a less vulnerable non-privileged user. For non-experts, it can be simpler to reinstall Windows, in which case you’d need all the drivers for the laptop’s hardware - graphics, sound, network and so on, possibly on a CD which came with the laptop, or which should be downloadable somewhere.
Good advice from Usram Most likely it has Word for a wordprocessor, which is what you probably will use the most often. Nothing to learning that, it’s pretty obvious for most things, comes with spellchecker, etc.
You can look to see (Start/Programs) if there are any antivirus programs there. If not, you can get free AVG, and for spyware, free Ad-Aware and some others. Run them weekly, and they should keep it clean.
While looking at the programs, any that you don’t know what they are, open them to see if you want them. If not, uninstall them. Any that you know you don’t want, also uninstall. Do a defragmentation.
If you don’t go online, you have no worries about malware anyway.
If you only keep one program at a time open, you can get by with that limited RAM, but for not an awful lot of money, you can boost it to 512K, but you’ll have to get some expert advice as to what kind you have now, as there are all sort of flavors of RAM, and you have to get the same thing.
Fool around with the word processor, the spreadsheet and database programs that are likely on it (probably Microsoft Office suite) and you’ll find them not so different from what you are used to.
I don’t have any of the the software or anything; I only have the laptop, the wireless card, and the AC adapter. I might try to see if I could get the restore CD, but I wouldn’t count on it. If I re-intstalled Windows, would I lose all the applications and documents that are on the computer? I don’t know what’s on it. It has MS Office, but I assume that comes with the Windows installation.
I wouldn’t want to install Linux unless it was a dual-boot option. Like I said, I probably want to have a computer I can run Windows programs on.
As for memory, so far I’m seeing one 512MB card running $45-50, which would take it to 768MB. Where am I supposed to get it for $50/gig?
It apparently has Spybot, Ad-Aware SE Personal, and AVG Free.
AVG Free shouldn’t be out of date at all- it’s free. Run it, update it, and do a scan once a week or so. Spybot and Ad-Aware should handle spyware pretty well. Keep a firewall up, don’t do anything too sketchy on the 'nets, and you should be fine virus-wise.
Windows doesn’t usually come with Microsoft Office.
If you’re at a school, ask them about getting a copy of Office for cheap. Like $20 cheap. You can also probably get a copy of XP SP2 for $60.
Check www.crucial.com to find out what RAM you need. Then compare their price with other places like www.newegg.com.
If you really can’t get a clean install of Windows, get the free trial at www.tune-up.com and let it clean and optimize your stuff. Go through every setting.
If it has SpyBot, AdAware and AVG, make sure you update all of those before you run them. If you do end up getting a clean install, you can get all of those apps for free: AVG AdAware SpyBot
As for being deathly afraid of viruses…just don’t be an idiot. Lots of people run Windows machines and have no problems with viruses or spyware. If you’re just going to use the laptop for school stuff and word processing then you’ll be just fine. Use a web-based email service and Firefox.
If you start using it to surf porn, open e-Cards from “Your Mother Has Sent You An E Card” and download warez well that’s your own fault
Have you had much experience with this? My son (9) was recently given a laptop and I tried setting him as a limited user, because he tends to tinker, but nothing seemed to work properly that way - all his games were asking for permission to run as an administrator, and if I give him the admin credentials to enable that, there’s no t much point having his account set as limited. How am I supposed to get it to work?
One thing - if you do the wipe and reinstall from the original media (actually, I think that brand/model of computer has a hidden restore partition, so you might just need a disk to make the system boot into that partition), you’re probably going to end up with an installation of Windows that includes bundled Symantec/Norton antivirus or security products of some kind. Ditch them and install AVG again (plus all the Windows Update stuff).
As everyone else said, absolutely get the memory upgrade. If you have to completely wipe the machine, Open Office is an unbelievably great freeware open source alternative to Microsoft Office. It’s got Word, Excel and PowerPoint clones, plus a reasonably serviceable drawing app and a really cool database. Unfortunately, the documentation for the database is rather sparse, but for day to day use, the aforementioned Office clones work just like their costly brethren.
I’m a network administrator. Everyone here is a limited user. You can give admin rights to individual files or folders. Some programs require making the user an admin to install the program, and returning the user to limited after the install.
Hmm… I wonder what’s happening in my son’s case then - the game is asking for admin privileges each time it runs (if I try running without, it just crashes). Ironically, it’s a Microsoft game (Midtown Madness 2).
Some older games, Win 95 or 98 want to write to the registry. I haven’t figured out how to make that happen. One of my users bought a lot of kid’s games at garage sales, and they won’t run as a limited user.
This works in corporate settings where all apps are installed via formal channels and the desktop is tweaked to allow the full suite of apps to work. The key factor is having skilled folks such as yourself and the tools available to do the job.
Day to day usage of an XP Home machine as a Limited user at home is not exactly painful, but you run in to plenty of strange permission issues that masquerade as bugs.
In addition, XP Home doesn’t allow file-by-file modification of permissions, without delving into command-line stuff, so it’s hard to clear these up by simply granting permissions.
Many apps think they can write little files to their install directories when they run, and they often fail silently with strange symptoms when they hit errors while writing their files to the “Program Files” hierarchy.
I ran as Limited for half a year before I gave in to the frustration and started running as Administrator.
Oh well, I’m glad to know I’m in good company. I guess I’ll just have to keep good backups and be prepared to reinstall everything if he should manage to mess the system up beyond repair.
They should only use the user’s part of the registry (HKEY_CURRENT_USER) but often they needlessly use the system-wide parts after installation. Sometimes you can fix these problems by finding the registry key (e.g. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Shoddy Games Inc\BugFest) and changing the permissions on that key to something more liberal. I.e. the same idea as giving the “\Program Files\Shoddy Games Inc\BugFest” directory whatever permissions it needs to get the damn game working.
Stuff that tries to write to \windows or whatever is even more of a pain in the arse. Then you have to work out which individual files it needs access to.
I don’t know about the games thing - some of the more recent games my family got wanted to run as admin too. I think Civ IV, Pirates, and maybe a few others wanted to do it too. We “solved” it by creating an admin account “Poorly Designed Games” and doing the “Run As” on regular user accounts or forbidding net access from that account.
