back from extended hiatus and general questions

Hi to all here. I've been off the internet and out of touch for the last 3 years or so and things are definitely not the same as they were back then. I have an old Inspiron 4000 700Mhz notebook and a Gateway 1.4Ghz desktop that are obviously old, but suite me just fine, at least for now.

I reformatted both hard drives and reinstalled Windows Me that came with both systems, and while Microsoft doesn't support it anymore, I did archive the patches and fixes and installed the updates. There are some minor BIOS and registry issues that I'd like to resolve and will post to the appropriate sections of this forum later.

Right now, I've updated AVG free to version 7.5 which seems to work well. But Ad-aware SE personal is no longer supported, nor is my Sygate firewall. I've searched the internet for replacements including here on majorgeeks, but some of these new firewalls are not compatible with Me. I tried to replace Ad-aware's definition file with the current one, but the program doesn't recognize it, so I've given up on it.

Does anybody have any suggestions on a good firewall and malware destroyers for Windows Me, both free and for purchase? Secondly, if I were to upgrade Windows, which version would u recommend overall AND on these 2 systems? thanx for any and all feedback on this.

 

Nice to be here chas and thanx for the tips...that's super. Appreciate that..thanx a lot!

Oddly enough, the fan to my desktop just blew out. Surprisingly tho the hard drive is still kicking after 8 years...my son abused it like heck when he had it for a couple of years there...

Yeah, I know what u mean about Me being outdated. I'm not surprised really, I know we're in 2008 and technology keeps on changing...what sorta blows me away is that people are still using win98 even today...but if their needs are small I guess...

the other thing I did notice too was, well I use crap cleaner, and d**g, i'm only online for maybe half an hour or so and after I get offline, I use that thing and it cleans out about 50 to 100mb of garbage, and I don't d/l anything other than the websites!!! :-D Years ago it didn't even get that close!

About the upgrade to 2000 on the notebook, its got 256mb RAM and last week I asked a dell 'technician' which latest version of windows could be installed and he said XP. I kinda thought that was odd cause I had heard that XP takes a lot of juice to run, so that's y I asked it here... the desktop has 128mb RAM and now that the fan blew out, I'm not about to do any upgrading to it...

I'll check out your links and get back with u...I'm also using bazooka scanner...any thoughts on that?

I'll definitely keep on using Sygate for now...until I figure out what I'm going to do with the lap and desktop...