Malwarebytes left me high and dry

Yeah, had those tards tell me to either upgrade to Win7 or go use Malwarebytes. Imagine a company sending 500,000+ customers to its competitor, because it's too dang lazy to a keep a version working for XP.

Also heard the same "outlandish" drivel from various forums. Idiot whiners crying that my using XP endangered their site or others operating systems. My answer to that is maybe they should be using Linux on their site....and if Win7, Win8 & Win10 is so safe and wonderful...it should be bulletproof to my lowly XP Pro.

I do believe this is a form of brainwashing, via mass propaganda and disinformation. Not the first time its happened either. I recall the mass derision when M$ first released Palladium. So much whining and complaints from the various blogs and talking heads that its name was changed to NGSCB, then to Longhorn or LaGrande, and when that failed to quell the tide of negative publicity, it was jobbed out to Intel or TCG, and which point its alias was changed to 'Trusted Computing'. After a mass spin-doctoring publicity campaign, all of a sudden all them that hated it now loves it, wants it, and can't get enough of it.
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html

 

I suspect it wasn't just that: if memory serves, not a month earlier they had published a good article about the many shady sides of Win10, advising to give it a wide berth.
Then, a month later on the same blog, all of a sudden Win10 was not really so bad, on the contrary it was quite OK, move safely to it where we can support you better... maybe it's just my nose, but I get a vague scent of big money and marriage of convenience rather than laziness.

 

I am still using malwarebytes version 3.5.1.2522 , free, legacy, just ran a scan yesterday, I only use it as ondemand scanning

 

Since my unpleasant adventure with Malwarebytes about one year ago, as on-demand MW scanner I've been using ClamWin: free, open source, portable.
The flip side of it, besides its discouraging sluggishness, is the fact that in nearly one year it didn't find one single suspicious item - which in these times of crapware galore doesn't sound terribly reassuring.
Thus I'm considering to swallow my pride, follow your example and turn back to a free version of Malwarebytes after disabling all its interactive features: whereas the risk of an XP machine being attacked directly may be negligible nowadays, testing regularly and reliably the software downloaded from unknown sites is still a survival factor.

Do you have an idea where I can get some 'certified' guinea pig malware (without committing suicide, possibly) to test it comme il faut before trusting it 100%?

 

https://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch001386.htm

you can read above on how to test your pc, computerhope is a great website for How-To's.

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the only time I was ever infected was when I was using a paid antivirus, since I have been using free antivirus as my realtime scanner and malwarebytes free as my ondemand scanner, I have not been infected, lucky right?

I like to believe that I am a smart surfer and scanner, I have my AV scan daily with a quick scan, and I scan weekly or more often with a FULL scan, my ondemand I scan weekly with a full scan. and with uBlock origin whenever I get a site that has been blocked, I just search for a similar site that will give me the same info and is not blocked, which must therefore be a cleaner site,

 

Yep, same here. This and my two firewalls are my main protection. I ditched Avira Free about a year ago, and had zero problems with virus attacks, irregardless of what the M$ Chicken Littles want to believe. As I go to any site I want (or should I say any site I can get to that the CA nazis don't blockade me from?), I take no care in this. I got no doubt that XP Pro is nowhere near as vulnerable as the MS parrots and lapdogs want everyone to believe. Secondly, I attribute my results not to luck, but to my hardware and software firewalls. I have little doubt this is why Malwarebytes has always been idle. Since Outpost Firewall 2009 is so old (and failed to stop CCleaner from updating), I suspect the NAT/SPI firewall of my Mikrotik router is the main hero.

 

Thank you again Elizabeth, it's really a GREAT site!
Reading it thoroughly is probably going to take the whole day but it looks like it will be worth every second.
Plain easily readable style, no useless frills, plenty of precious info about what I was looking for and countless other topics I was curious about but wasn't expecting to find there.
I've just passed the link on to my wife, a web designer, who's still uttering her "oooh", "ah!", "dammit I didn't know this!" in the other room .

 

@ Chiron:-

You could do a lot worse than to give some of the ultra-lightweight Linux distros a try. I ran XP from day one till EOL, and toward the end was purely & simply fed up with it. Come April 2014, I wiped XP out of my life and dived head-first into Ubuntu 14.04 LTS 'Trusty Tahr'. Had a lot of fun getting that going, then 6 months later my old Compaq desktop (genuine, original, high-quality Compaq, not HP 'namesake' trash) started freezing up several times a day....

Turned out Canonical, the people behind Ubuntu, and who insist on 'customizing' the versions of the Linux kernel that they use, had only decided it was time to drop support for my graphics adapter (Mark Shuttleworth, the South African entrepeneur who heads Canonical, likes to think of Ubuntu as a direct competitor to whatever the current Microsoft flagship happens to be.....and in so doing, has pretty much abandoned the general Linux policy of trying to keep old hardware useful). An acquaintance on the Ubuntu Forums suggested I tried 'Puppy' Linux; Puppy's 'take' on 'Trusty', Tahrpup, had just been released.....

So I gave it a try. And the graphics 'problem' cleared up overnight, like a switch had been thrown (Puppy uses bog-standard kerenls, direct from kernel.org). I've been with Puppy ever since. No malware, no arsing about with daily AV scans, just getting on with what I want to do.....and having fun again!

The beauty of Puppy is that you can run it entirely from a flashdrive; it loads into, and runs completely from RAM in a 'virtual' ram-disk, if you choose the 'frugal' install option....which makes it blazing fast, even on 15-yr old, DDR1-standard hardware. Puppy's rescued many an old box whose owners would have otherwise consigned it to the trash long ago.....

The Puppy community not only condones, but positively encourages you to modify the hell out of your Pups, and to share your experiences. They're an incredibly helpful & friendly bunch of guys'n'gals. I now spend a lot of my time helping out beginners on the Puppy Forum, and building/modifying/re-packaging software for the community.....including the current Google Chrome packages into their Puppy-specific counterparts.

I am having a lot of fun....for the first time in years.


Mike.

 

@Mike_Walsh does Puppy have any features to support the blind or visually impaired i.e. screen reading software that speaks aloud on-screen items?

 

I'm not Mike, but I use Puppy some as well, and yes it does support those types of programs. I don't think, however, that it comes with them out of the box.

 

@ CathedralCity:-

As Computer semi-expert says, Puppy doesn't come OOTB with such features (Pup's only a couple of hundred megs in size. Yes, that tiny..!), but it's perfectly possible to install them (and quite easy, too).

I'm currently using 3 TTS (text-to-speech) apps (built for Windows, but running under a real-time, 'abstraction' layer, called WINE).....Balabolka, TTS Reader, and the accepted industry standard, TextAloud. I'm using these with the AT&T 'Natural' voices; normally these cost a small fortune, and have to be purchased, but I have a source from whence I obtained them free of charge. And it all works very well.

One facet of Puppy is the ease with which it's possible to re-build it with your own choice of apps/features/programs. Consequently many 'Puppians' have, over the years, produced their own 'take' on Puppy......called 'Puplets'. And one of these was put together by a Puppian known as ETP, with the visually-impaired in mind.

Think the cartoon character 'Mr. Magoo'.....and you're 3 parts of the way there. Add some of this text-to-speech stuff, and you'll be even closer....

You can do literally ANYTHING with Linux. Trust me.


Mike.

 

I finally broke down and bought a LiveCD of Bionic Puppy off OSDisc right before they went OOB. Got around to trying it last week. Same old crapola. No automatic connection to the internet...you still have to try to guess how to setup the internet connection via some wizard, or whatever. As per the four versions tried prior, I was unable to guess what options to pick to get access to the internet. As before, I pitched the disc into the dumpster, but this time no more test drives for Puppy. This distro is not for beginners, not intuitive, nor designed for Windows expats. In my experience that would be MX Linux, with Linux Mint as second choice. Glad you were able to get this bad dog housebroken, but for me was off to the vet for some euthanasia!

 

Except games.

 

What a waste of your time with Crappy Puppy

 

I guess if you know what you're doing to setup the internet connection by hand, it's okay. Supposedly super fast as it runs entirely in RAM, but I'll never know. Even if I could figure out how to deal with that rot, I would not want to every day I used it, and there are enough Linux distros around that connect to the internet automatically on boot up.

 

Yes, a few people known to me who used puppy linux, either had problems similar to yours or gave up after a very short experience and went in for Mint or Manjaro and another one that I forget.

And much more user friendly too.

 

In fact, you only need to 'mess about', setting the connection up, the very first time you use it.....like most distros. Even that's pretty simple; years ago, Barry Kauler, Pup's originator, wrote an app called 'Simple Network Setup'.....and Ethernet is up-and-running in just 3 clicks. Every boot after that, Puppy auto-connects without any intervention.

I suppose the reason Puppy has 3 or 4 different network wizards is because this OS was designed to be portable from the very first release almost 16 years ago. If you're carting it around with you, and using it in first one place, then another, you need different tools because not everybody has a handy computer with Ethernet plugged in, ready to go..... Ethernet is, for many people, the exception nowadays, rather than the rule. Most folks are using wireless all the time.

Even Windows needs a few pointers the very first time you use it.....I don't think I've heard of any OS that can find a wireless network and connect to it without you telling it anything at all. That said, if your Ethernet is plugged-in, and correctly set-up at the router's end of things, it's not too much of a stretch to imagine it could be done.

But I will be the first to admit, due to many unique ways Pup has of doing things (even mainstream Linux users consider it 'odd'), I would not recommend it to beginners. You do need a certain mind-set to use Pup as your 'daily driver', though after nearly 6 years I can't now imagine using anything else. 'One man's meat', etc....

Variety is what makes the world a more interesting place. God, wouldn't it be boring if everybody wanted to always do exactly the same things, all the time??


Mike.

 

I agree that Puppy is not for beginners. Neither is the network setup at first. But it doesn't forget once you set it up.

 

Well now if you walk me through the "Ethernet is up-and-running in just 3 clicks", I might buy the disc again, and give it one last shot. I'm obviously not good at guessing what to do, and this distro is obviously not intuitive. I'd like to at least get the dang thing onto the internet before I pitch it....just so i know whether I want to deal with it every day. I'd also need to know how to activate the firewall.

 

I'd love to help. Some tips:
You can download an ISO file and burn your own CD or USB drive.
You can boot Puppy from USB, so if you have a USB drive of at least 500 MB (Puppy is tiny!) you're good to go.