I\'m donating an old Windows XP laptop to a school. The machine will spend its g

Question

I'm donating an old Windows XP laptop to a school. The machine will spend its golden years doing only one thing - a process that consists of just three steps:

1. Recording lectures and discussions with MP3 recorder software (the app is MP3myMP3).
2. Uploading these recordings over an unsecured wireless connection to a password-protected (https:) school web site, to make them available to students participating remotely in classes.
3. Sending emails to the students after each upload, announcing that the latest recording is available. This is done thru a GMail account (accessed with Firefox) that will be used only to do this, and only on this computer.

Here's the tricky part: The old laptop is near its performance limit when doing real-time recording, and competing with wireless connections and security software for CPU cycles sometimes puts it over the edge, and we end up with skips and blips in the recordings. So it seems necessary to disable the wireless and disable the security services (currently using Norton Security Suite) while doing step 1, then re-enable them (in the opposite order, of course) when doing step 2.

But the problem with these disable/enable steps is that this whole process needs to be as simple as possible for the users who are doing it, because there are time constraints, some users with little training and experience, and the problem that each manual step is another opportunity to make fatal errors.

I'm pretty sure we need to have a functioning firewall during step 2, but I'm not sure if we also need antivirus, if all we'll ever be doing with this machine is these three steps - no other emailing, no web browsing, no other apps that interact with the internet. If we can do without the antivirus, that would save the two steps of disabling and re-enabling it.

So I'd appreciate yes/no advice about antivirus, and any other ideas for improving this peculiar setup.

Explanation / Answer

This situation really depends on how you want to approach this issue, Yes you will always need virus protection, I wouldn't recommended Norton as the best solution for this. It has its pro's but its a complete resource hog and will contribute in taking large amounts of Resources. Better to find something with a smaller footprint like Microsoft security essentials.

If you are looking to introduce more than one computer to possible threat, a firewall would give you control of the outbound and inbound connection to the machine as well as application control pointed out towards the internet.

A Sonicwall with a UTM ( Unified Threat Managment) product on it would fit your situation as it is an All in one option. Its not really ideal for one computer per say, but a strong option at that.

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