|
Sorry its long winded, decades of experience and wanting to bonk people with their computers pent up inside I guess. If you were local I would offer to sort out the machine for you. I expect I could upgrade the ram, certainly that 75gb drive, but not really set up since my stroke for doing that sort of stuff much these days. If you do set up windows again I highly recommend you google “malware hosts file winhelp2002” its a page/site that provides a hostfile and installation instructions. The hostsfile in windows provides a way to block network access to certain IPs and domains and I’ve used the list on this site for years on my machines and friends I’ve rebuilt. Its invisible to user and I trust this list is ONLY Blocking malicious addresses and no services or update addresses of legitimate software. They update the list periodically so visit back periodically and reinstall the updated list. Its a text file and not a program, but you might have to install a program to get it to update your hosts file as windows changed permissions access to the file to stop people accessing it themselves with notepad and screwing up things if they do something wrong. This page provides good instructions for normal folk. If you do things wrong you can mess up internet access to legitimate stuff but if you understand what you’re doing you can also use it to block all sorts of things. I’m a privacy supporter and i hate how most people dived into mobile phones (ooo shiny thing!) and threw away their privacy without a thought. But this hosts file change Will work just fine and will help a lot of tracking stuff you aren’t even aware of, and after years of experience with it I’m confident there are not legitimate entries in this list that will cause any issues for anyone using their computer and the internet normally. I’f you visit pirate software sites you might find things being blocked or unable to download but the normal people dont ever need to visit such sites and should even go peek either. This is the ONE essential security step everyone should implement. And I repeat It wont stop your computer from infection, but it will stop some methods of infection and marketing tracking etc from working, and its just configuring a vital part of the windows OS, Its not a program itself so takes up zero resouces, everthing trying to make a network connection is first compared against the hostfile to see if its allowed or needs to go to a certain location. That website explains better, but you should do this on your daughters desktop as well as her laptop too and really everyone should with any windows machine they have, its just a help and reduces thousands of attack vectors from the equation.it only takes one attack vector to get a foothold in a machine to open the floodgates for more.
Its a simple no brainer thing to do but most people dont understand windows and networking and wont ever be exposed to the existence of the hostsfile. Because it controls networking so fundamentally it is powerful and great for customising your home /office network. Its just a plain text file so easy to edit but therefore easy to type in a mistake and screw up networking which is why microsoft implemented permissions change to prevent people editing directly which of course make it avector of attack itself, an outsider could configure say google.com to take you to their own server that looks like google, same address etc, same look and same login, now they can capture your google credentials, paypal, amazon etc whatever they want really its just a little bit harder for people to edit their hostfile now so if a scammer convince someone to install a remote access program on their computer its just a little harder for them to modify your hostfile. Its confusing to simplify for people to comprehend. Hostsfile is just a tool, like a steak knife, (or if you’re American a fully automatic assault rifle), its something that is used under normal usage it can be improved (which is what I’m suggesting with the configure file from the above WinHelp200 site) but if handled badly or with bad intent can cause much damage.
My advice, do the search exactly as I provided above, read the site for your own information, then follow their installation instructions and do this at least once a year on every machine. I think their easies instructions does involve dowloading a tool specialised for editing the hostfile but beyond that and the archived hostfile they provide I think thats all to download, PM me if you like. Some internet security software keeps an eye on the hostsfile and might block or restore the default, but its easy enough to confirm its done anytime like afte a reboot just open Notepad, go to where the hostsfile lives in the c drive and drag it into notepad to view its contents.
Ok I’ll shut up now.
|