I?ve been given a very old Dell desktop (10-year old Dimension 400) from some friends of ours who recently bought a new laptop.
From a hardware perspective, this old Dell still works fine although disk space is minimal. It has two hard drives installed, one about 10gb (C drive) and the other about 20gb (D drive). Also, the pc only has about 224 mb?s of ram.
From a software perspective, things were a mess. Tons of out-of-date programs, multiple anti-virus programs, missing links, possible malware, etc. etc. So, rather than try to salvage what was there, I reformatted both drives and installed a fresh version of XP Pro on the C drive. I spent much of yesterday installing Windows updates and it is now fully updated and patched (SP3), and I also upgraded to IE8.
We intend to use the computer primarily for the kiddies to play internet games -- the 8 year old loves Legos Star Wars -- and as a learning tool. (We have another home computer for more serious matters.)
To keep things simple and hopefully to keep the system running as optimally as possible given it?s space and memory limitations, I want to put as little as possible on the C drive and to use the somewhat larger D drive to save music and picture files and to install portable apps. I don?t intend to install Microsoft Office.
Thus far, the only program I have installed on the C drive (other than the XP operating system) is Returnil to help make the pc kid-proof. There?s about 3 gb of space remaining on the C drive. Even though Returnil is also useful from a security standpoint, I probably should supplement it by installing on the C drive an anti-malware program as well. I?ve been debating between something robust like Avast (about 40 mb?s) and something minimal like Malwarebytes (about 5 mb?s). I am not familiar with Returnil, Avast or MBAM, but they appear to be well-regarded on this forum (I played around with Returnil last night after installing it and it seems very straight-forward).
Sorry for being long-winded, but I wanted to give as much info as possible to put everything in context. I?d be grateful for your ideas, thoughts, and suggestions regarding whether you recommend an anti-malware program and, if so, which one.
Edit: I should clarify that I installed Returnil 2008. I know Returnil 2010 has anti-virus features, but opted to steer clear of that version after reading Dennis's thread about his problems with it.