Any advice on de-crudding WinXP?

[lilfluff]

I recently spotted a laptop cheap enough to talk myself into buying, with one tiny problem. It has XP Home on it, I'm not used to playing with XP under anything other than a regular user account. Can anyone point me at good advice for, A: Keeping it from getting turned into a spam/ddos/whatnot zombie the instant it's connected to the internet, B: running reasonably stable, and C: Maximizing battery life (already decided the LCD is usable at just under 50% brightness, and I'm planning on giving it fairly aggressive timings for going into sleep mode).

In other news, MS Works 2004 is officially evil. If anything I am thinking it's actually a little less friendly to work with than my old copy of Works 4.0 (or was it 3.0). Happily that is why I already grabbed the current version of Open Office.

This is encouraging me to look at setting up a wireless network again, which brings another question. Do any of the wireless cards/usb boxes for desktop machines have firewalls or anything more than WEP to help keep folks from getting onto your machines?

(Interesting, spellcheck recognized whatnot, but not USB)

Comments

[jecook]

RE:

A:
Run Firefox, not IE, and keep the machine up to date with all the service packs and whatnot.

b: XP is remarkably stable, even on reasonably low end machines (and even some unreasonably low end machines) However, you'll still get BSODs if you have legacy hardware or cranky printer that require their own software to function properly and that have not been certified XP compatible ::coughs and points to LJ3100::

c:
You'll have to play with it for battery life, but that's mostly a function of CPU power draw, and a few other factors. My Vaio (which is really old hardware) gets about 2 hours out of it's single battery, which is long enough to watch a movie of something. XP's power management is incrementally better then 2000, and worlds better then 98 and 98se.

Works is teh evil. oOo is teh bawmb.

For wireless, there is WEP, Windows WPA is slightly newer (but it may or may not work with the hardware you purchase). First thing: turn off SSID broadcasts. Second: if your equipment can agree on a WEP key that works (or you've bought the same brand of product) use the highest WEP level that it will go to. Third, if you are paranoid: Use MAC filtering on the firewall if it supports it. This will only allow machines whose hardware addresses you have entered be permitted wireless access.