Security: Using Vista in todays

[OldManInABoat]

Morning all, I have a scenario that i wanted to put out here for comment and thoughts because its doing my head in.

My son has had a laptop for a longtime and does not like change (he's autistic, so his reactions to even little changes can be tears and upset and the least, and throwing things and hurting himself at worst).

His laptop runs Windows Vista, and has no anti-virus.

I've tried a few times to replace the laptop with a newer one, most recently spending AGES getting a Win10 laptop with all his files on to behave as the old one does, but the kicker was the way in which File Explorer in Vista allows him to move file order based on his visual preference rather than file name; i cannot replicate this in Win10, as even a regedit mod which does allow files to move doesnt remember the order when exiting / returning to the folder.
You may say "why not just rename the files, or put a 1 in front etc to group them...". He's autistic, and i'll leave it at that. Not happening.

Tearing my hair out whilst he had a meltdown, i've returned the Vista machine to him.

I'm now wondering if i should bother because:-
1) There is nothing that i can find that is 'signed in' (especially Chrome etc), so in theory no personal details are on it.
2) Wirelessly, is connected to a guest network within the home - so it shouldnt be able to communicate with any other machine.
3) He doesnt use email - all he does is browse to websites showing videos of kids videos, and use MS paint to copy and paste pictures he likes.

My working premise is that he certainly will at some point aquire either a virus, or trojan etc; but i'm trying to think through what the problem with that would be exactly.
Thoughts welcome please!!

[smargh]

Just keep Vista, don't run as a local admin, and use DeepFreeze. Make sure it's an SSD to make drive failure less likely.

I had to do similar (Win7 with SteadyState, I think) when repeatedly trying to help someone who got malware very regularly due to trusting everything.

For someone else I had to use Win10 and Sandboxie, but over time that does need manual intervention with upgrades, unexpected/undesirable prompts, stuff occasionally not working correctly etc.

[OldManInABoat]

Thank you - id never heard of deepfreeze, will give that a solid read through, looks like it may be the ticket.

[Saracen999]

You are in a "rock and hard place" situation, as I'm sure you're fully aware.

All I can suggest is to get hold of an identical hard drive (or SSD) and create a mirror image of his 'live' drive. Probably a good idea to keep an image file of that setip on your machine too.

Then, if snything happens, you can remove the infected/corrupted drive, repla ce with the copy (so he's happy) and format/restore-from-image the cirrupted drive on yoyr system.

Oh, and backup, backup and backup his data files.


But, sooner or later, that laptop is going to die. Quite how you get round that ..... dunno. If you can, buy a spare system, even used if need be, now, while (hopefully) you still can.

Otherwise, eventually .....

[OldManInABoat]

THanks. The good news is there is no real data to speak of either, as he just saves pictures and looks at them (ie everything could be found again through a google search).
Appreciate the replies though chaps.

[AGTDenton]

as even a regedit mod which does allow files to move doesnt remember the order when exiting / returning to the folder.
You may say "why not just rename the files, or put a 1 in front etc to group them...".

Do you still have reference to the registry key for this? I'm intrigued it isnt saving.

[Zak33]

would be worth getting on Ebay and buying a similar lappy while they still exist and are cheap.

then get a couple of suitably newer hard drives and see if you can have a full time spare lappy running.

You're not gonna get a new lappy to run on Vista- as there won't be any drivers for it.

this might sound utterly crazy but what if you installed a totally different OS ... on a new lappy... so that you didn't try to even begin to replicate the old one's behavoiur or appearnce and then left them both for use?

by accident.....

so you had a second potential offering.. just sat... doing nothing... always on but never mentioned..... until it was asked about.