‘Kung Fu’ For Your Operating System
Joe M posted in free stuff, opinion, products, security on May 10th, 2009
I had a couple of days off this week.
After a couple months of begging from a friend of mine, I finally surrendered, and brought her machine home.
It was REALLY slow. Running Windows XP Home, and it looked as if everyone in the household did whatever they wanted on it.
No virus scanner updates, malware ridden… there was much to do with it.
I took several hours.
I went through what used to be my usual regimen. (Virus scan, reboot, malware scan, reboot, msconfig, reboot, registry tweaks, reboot, virus scan, reboot, etc.)
With each task, I would start it, then walk away.
After two days, I finally gave up.
Malware and viruses have gotten so sophisticated, I could have worked on the machine for a week… to no avail.
I finally used the HP recovery utility to restore the machine to the original factory fresh settings.
After that, I used PCDecrapifier to remove all of the junk that comes pre-loaded. (That’s all of the trialware, upon first inspection, looks like a great deal? That’s until you use it for 30/60/90 days and then it prompts you for your credit card info.)
Since no one in the user household really seems to pay attention to preventative maintenance… I was trying to figure out a way to allow them to surf the web, without putting the entire OS at risk.
Think of it as a software ‘Kung Fu’ for the OS. The Goal is to keep the OS isolated from web activity, as much as possible.
Sandboxie is probably a pretty good solution for them. (Sandboxie is about $41 US. That’s actually a pretty good deal. Lifetime registration, for any computer that you own… non-transferrable. That means you can’t just install it for a friend to use.)
Instead of using Sandboxie, I decided to install VirtualBox (SunMicro) and set up a virtual machine running Ubuntu Linux as a guest OS. I also installed the Guestbox Additions, to make using the VM a little simpler.
For all of their surfing, outside of updates, they will use the Ubuntu VM. That will place an addtional layer of security between Firefox and Windows.
If you would like a little info on VirtualBox, check out the website.
I set up a VM running Sugar, but you can substitute the Ubuntu ISO instead of Sugar. Check out the details on my post here.
My rules of thumb for them?
- No file sharing
- Stay off the web, except inside the Ubuntu VM
- Never use Internet Explorer, except for software updates
- Don’t install anything in Windows, unless you are completely aware of what you are installing
- Regularly, run defrag and protection updates (malware and virus)
I think this is the best strategy, especially since there does not seem to be anyone really technical in their household.
It’s been a while since I took on a task like this, and I am amazed at how little I got accomplished in trying to clean the machine.
I knew cleaning the OS was like beating a dead horse, but I decided to try it for kicks.
The easiest thing to do, if you are having major problems?
Reinstall or restore!
After the restore, I ran the updates, and some tweaks. The machine is practically flying, now.
Sometime this next week, I am going to post a refresher on setting up VirtualBox on Windows, with a Linux guest OS.
VirtualBox is free for personal use, as is Ubuntu.
May 25th, 2009 at 2:54 am
[...] few days back, I talked about setting up a virtual machine on top of Windows XP. I talked about the advantages and the [...]
July 13th, 2010 at 6:41 pm
Oh man. Am I the only person that finds this whole thing is weird?