A Viable Solution - Multiple OS?
 

Hi All,

I have an Acer Laptop with XP installed. I also have a 9 year old kid who loves to go to all these kiddo sites and pay online games educational stuff etc, and a wife who surf's the net - both are not very net savvy and i end up with virus on my PC very often and need to re-format my pc atleast once in 3-4 months.

Now I have a Dell E520 with 500GB Space and Vista - to get over the above - but my issue is how I get over this infection thing? I tried using separate login's, firewalls, even restricting access on IE - but nothing works.

I was thinking of making 4 partitions - Since I have enough Space
1) Windows Vista - for myself.
2) Windows XP - Which my wife and daughter can use
3) Linux - for my project work and testing
4) Data - Like My documents etc

That way - I can create an image file for the 2nd Partition and everytime I feel - they are infected - just overwrite the partition - they dont loose anything as all data are stored in separate partitions.

I am sure many people out there with kids - having the same problem - Can someone give me a solution to this? Am I going up the right lane? or just plain making my life more miserable?????

Dev

Whats wrong with getting a good anti virus program? AVG free edition is very good, i have used it for years.

Hi Firefox,

Antivirus is good - have been using the Zonealarm pro suite which includes all the stuff like adware, spamware, antivirus etc and is quite effective - but then some of these viruses - which get installed due to the 'Yes' that is clicked when my daughter downloads and installs flash games from Nick toons or some other site...

similarly, the cookie viruses and other adwares that somehow creep in and ultimately make the pc creeping !!!

thats why i though - I could make an image and when i felt things are creeping - just drop the old installation and re-image - it would be the quickest solution.

Dev

Firefox
 

Hello, you can try using Firefox, it has a nice little option which when ever a site wants to set a cookie it asks if you want to either: 'Allow Cookie', 'Allow for session' or 'Deny'. I use it all the time because if you're not watching, cookies get put on your computer all the time and when you run your anti-spyware it finds them and then you need to delete them. Using firefox in this way is one method of cutting down on the risk of getting spyware or 'tracking cookies' etc.

Set it and show your daughter what to do everytime she starts downloading games, it pretty straight forward.

Regards

Martin

I agree FireFox would be a good start as it can stop scripts, cookies, files, etc from being downloaded or run on your computer.

To create your multi-OS environment you will have to make the 4 partitions, but you will need to ensure your family does not play around with partitions outside of there own, unless you want to actually lock out other drives.

http://www.syschat.com/dual-boot-vis...eady-1946.html
This tutorial will help you get XP installed, without destroying your Vista installation. Once that is completed, install your Linux, and ALLOW the grub bootloader to be used, Vista is quite compatible with it, when it boots you will be given grub options, if Windows is selected, you will then be given the list of Windows OSs.