>>Perhaps reintroducing the floppy net via USB sticks is a good idea to keep another clunker in splendid isolation ;-) To edit personal docs, data and number sheets another older machine should be good enough, as personal stuff is done with Office97 or OfficeXP, which have no problem running on HW from last decade and in disconnected state. Might be a good idea to check if the 17' single CoreM laptop with broken CD accepts USB boot media to introduce a linux host and lonely user VM, perhaps with a tiny SSD or USB3 connector card.
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>BTW, did you notice how the firewalls stopped reporting the calls to home? Last one which did that was the Sygate, which was then bought by Symantec, ergo dead. It dutifully reported things like this (see attached). That's how I found that the MSI loader calls Microsoft every time you install anything by a vendor who uses .msi... which stopped working when I switched to 64-bit. When this firewall was killed, 64-bit systems weren't out yet.
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>Now none of the firewalls report this kind of thing. They are allowing them by default, and even Comodo, which allegedly has the ability, gives you no help on how to do it. I tried a few times, uninstalled, installed, set up this way or that, but it never reported anything (like chrome calling the google on every url, or skype attempting another surreptitious update even after I set it on manual for the sixth time). So I just gave up, which is probably as (they think) it should be, no firewall at all.

Yes, I found this too. Every time you install any software Windows wants to contact MS. ESET Smart Security catches all these attempts but you must set it up in interactive mode. If you set it into default mode then is has already "cleared" those requests as OK. If you set to interactive mode then you get asked. In fact, in interactive mode you see Windows Explorer and many other Windows services and apps trying to call a range of MS IP addresses numerous times per day. I have narrowed it down to being able to block most of them but there a couple of addresses which, if you block for too long, result in your internet connection not working properly anymore. But I don't know the reason for the failure.

Also Jetico Firewall is rated as one of the very best and will also catch everything. The downside is that you will spend quite some time answering allow/deny questions for the multiple apps that try and get internet access. Unless you set it to auto-mode but then you are again at the mercy of what Jetico Firewall has been programmed to allow. I find ESET has a good balance between asking for permission and not interrupting me excessively.

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