I know that this might not be the best place for it, but right now my brain just hurts from this.
He picked up some junked boxes running XP and Vista and wants to use them as daily drivers and not as a joke, he thinks that he knows what he’s doing since he knows the barest of basics of running Spybot and CCleaner… Installs all manner of pirated crap and sees no issue with these OSs being EOLd… And it’s not like he doesn’t know how to use Linux, I gave him a laptop running Ubuntu 17.10 that he uses daily because he hated Windows 8 and 10 which he has on his desktop.
The guy thinks that security vulnerabilities are just propaganda and doesn’t even want to patch his OS, which is why I setup his Ubuntu laptop to do it automatically and silently.
Can you put him on an isolated VLAN or something? I say let him do whatever, and just protect yourself. As far as him pirating stuff, that’s another matter. You’re at risk to be drug down into copyright hell because of him. Make him put the internet bill in his name?
In that case, do all you can to protect yourself and wait. When it goes bad for him you can choose what happens there after. Either told you so, help and probably get no thanks or just have the number of a local repair place ready to hand him and walk away from the entire mess.
Ugh. Hopefully he gets wannacry or something like that before too much longer.
If it is your lan, or you have the ability to install and configure a router, you can block a fair bunch of stuff there that will make things safer.
If not, protect yourself and your info. Encourage him to take backups just in case. Let it burn.
Any time someone asked me to help with their PC and it was running XP or Vista it made me want to pull my teeth out with rusty pliers. It would most certainly be less painful.
XP is still getting updates directly from Microsoft if he has applied the POSReady2009 registry tweak. Those patches will still be rolled out until January 2019, so XP is still supported really.
People are still updating their Vista installs using Windows Server 2008 patches, which seem to work just fine (not that surprising since it’s basically the same OS)
If he’s careful, running an EoL OS isn’t necessarily dangerous. I know of at least one security researcher and programmer who still uses XP as his main OS.
But it sounds like your roommate really isn’t that careful, so take your precautions if you’re on the same network.
“accidentally” drop strong magnet on the HDD then when he discovers his disk failed you can convince him to get another OS
As an alternative, why not just find some old win7 prebuilt being tossed, snap a pic of the license key, then give it to him? win7 after all the patches and updates is a much better overall system compared to XP. its a free upgrade for him and it makes you seen generous potentially
As long as he understands the risks and keeps good backup for boot and nuke he should be fine.
if he likes xp and i question how he likes vista… but hey if he likes it then fine.
i sympathize with people wanting to keep their old familiar operating systems and programs that behave predictably.
something to be said about knowing what your machine is doing and how it operates, unlike todays auto patching self mutating operating systems of today where developers are just as likely to remove features as to add them .
so no i dont fault these people, developers have created this kinda mess by eroding the publics trust .every botched patch changed feature and forced ui change does nothing more than harden this sentiment
