>>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.

I did notice, but was not really concerned by it. I had used Comodo a few years ago and looking after those rules had grown into a task not looked forward to. Firewall on the individual machine IMO is to a great extent only placebo: the real task is at the router level. Which is IMO also the correct level (or listening to the wire with a dedicated machine) if you want to go to the bottom of such things, as the machine calling home and trying to catch such calls is always a bit suspect.