Naked Science Forum
General Discussion & Feedback => Just Chat! => Topic started by: ukmicky on 01/03/2007 01:25:00
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Help please
I'm dual booting my pc with 32bit xp pro on one side and on the other xp pro 64 bit but i cant go online using windows xp 64bit as i havent got any firewall or antivirus software running
Does anyone here use xp pro 64bit .If so do you know whats the best free or paid for antivirus firewall software.
what are you using.
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Avast (http://www.avast.com/eng/avast_4_home.html) works on 64 bit (the paid up version of AVG does also, but not the free version) - that will work for anti-virus - not sure what to do about the firewall.
I was using XP 64 Pro for a while, and came across the same problems - the final killer was that I could not get drivers for my Canon printer for XP 64 Pro.
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The only driver i cant get is for my scanner which aint a big deal.
To be be honest it dosent seem to make much difference speed wise ,probably because all the programs are 32bit but the way i see it is ive got the processor so i may as well try it.
Cheers george i will try avast as i dont want to pay for something that i may not use much.
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I did not get much of an opportunity to prove any differences in speed either.
I did get the feeling (but difficult to prove) that it was more stable. In part, this may be for the very reason that it does not run 32 bit device drivers, so some of the flakier device drivers around simply will not work on it, but it may also be because the underlying codebase in Windows 2003 server edition, which I assume might be a more stable fork of the code (being targeted at the server rather than the desktop market) than the 32 bit XP fork.
As for the firewall, don't forget that XP has its own firewall, and while it may not be as good as ZoneAlarm (in particular, it does not trap outbound calls, only incoming calls), it is better than nothing. Also, my machine was in any case sitting behind a router which was NATing the Internet, so incoming access was partly protected through that also.
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A big thumbs up for avast, free and with auto updates, found it to be better than AVG.
I must admit though I have a dual boot system but with Linux "64Studio" for the interweb and producing music. No need for anti virus software, spyware, adware or firewall with Linux. The install also found the hardware: printer, soundcard, usb, ethernet and digital camera are all working fine
Win XP is on a fat 32 partition so I can also read and write to that partition under Linux.
The best thing I did was to switch to Linux for the net and in 18 months of use no problems at all!
TMM
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may I just ask what are the advantages of a dual boot system ?.I've never had one and have wondered what the benefits are ?
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may I just ask what are the advantages of a dual boot system ?.I've never had one and have wondered what the benefits are ?
A dual boot system is a computer on which you can choose to load one of two or more different operating systems.
For instance, suppose that in the morning you want to run your system with Windows XP 32 bit, in the afternoon you want to run your computer with Linux, and in the evening, you have some work to do on Windows XP 64 bit. In that case you would in fact have a triple boot system, where, upon staring up the computer, it would ask you which of the three operating systems you will want to work on.
Dual (or triple, or quadruple) boot systems are most commonly used by developers who may be developing, or testing, systems on more than one operating system. Occasionally it may be used by someone who has a particular application that works on one operating system, but mostly they use applications on another operating system. Alternatively, it may be used by hackers (not crackers) who want to just play around with another operating system, to get a feel for it, without dedicating a whole machine to running that operating system.
I used to have dual boot systems - now I just have 4 computers.
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THANK YOU very much George.
I can really see the advantages of a multi-boot system for those people that you describe.
It seems prerequisite for the reasons you give........and obvious now ! [::)] [::)]
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@ neilp
Some people I know have dual boot systems but with the same OS on both. A small partition that is interweb enabled and the other without the interweb, used for data and any sensitive work.
If a virus takes hold of the interweb partition it cant corrupt anything on the data partition and can then be wiped and replaced.
I would always recommend having a separate data partition or drive.
TMM