Old Windows and the Internet

it would be extremely painful
4U

I've been running XP on a regular basis up until a couple months ago now. I regularly avoided Microsoft updates unless there was something specific I thought was important. Not a single virus in my ~12 years of using the operating system.

If your ISP is semi competent they will drop inbound packets unless they were requested by you.

How do you host a server then? Your ISP would drop everyone who wanted to connect since you didn't initiate the connection. What a terrible idea.

That's what dyn-dns is needed for.

I just don't see the risk connecting an old 9x/2k/XP box to the net if you take the proper precautions: disable windows updates, IE, netbios, smb etc etc

This has been a helpful and informative thread, thank you all who have contributed.

I'm offering and adjunct professor position at the university if you are interested.

If it's a well made virus, you won't know it's there.

whats your favorite virus developer environment?

Most ISPs don't give a shit what you host as long as you aren't doing it for business or doing something otherwise illegal. I've never had issues with roadrunner/timewarner.