Cheapskate's Guide to a Safe PC

A couple of pages to help keep your machine safe and sound Cheapskate's guide to a safe PC .

Auric

 

Thanks for the link. Downloaded the Spybot- S&D app and it's found some interesting bits and pieces on my system, which have now been fixed.

Cheers,
BL21DE3

 

Also use Spybot S&D - very good.

Haven't looked at the link but if you use:
Norton AntiVirus, ZoneAlarm Pro and Spybot S&D you should be pretty sorted.

Michael.

 

I'd recommend using Adaware as well as Spybot, as IME one finds things that the other one does not...

 

I do indeed use Adaware and Spybot a long with GriSoft AVG and I feel that these catch most problems (but how cab I be sure?), I did at one time use Zonealarm but got a lot of errors with the ZoneAlarm TrueVectorService errors started appearing in my XP eventLog so I got rid of it. As I do not use any email from my machine but use MyWay, Yahoo! and a few others I feel that they do a fair job on my behalf of catching most if not all of the email deliverd nastyness. I'm on the lookout for another software firewall but will upgrade to a hardware one when I move to broadband sometime soonish.


Auric

PS The Mozilla FireFox does a good job of fighting infection by allowing setting of cookies and other things via the extensive Tools Options (I even go as far as to turn Java and Java Scripts on and off and stop any reffer information being passed back to a site depending upon where I am intending to browse).

 

Right, you lot made me paranoid, I'm sleeping with a hammer under the pillow from now on…

I downloaded the Spybot thingy, it is really good and seems to dig a little deeper than Adaware 6 which I was using previously. I like the way it shows what active X controls are installed etc. I'm pleased to say I had nothing more serious than a couple of data-mining cookies and some traces of the eBay toolbar that I'd uninstalled a month or so ago.

One great technique for keeping a clean PC is to refuse point blank to ever use Microsoft Outlook – it is the app that everyone targets, the best defence is to avoid it like the plague. Outlook may not technically be a plague, but it is certainly a huge festering wound that attracts any plague that may be passing. I have used Forte Agent (www.forteinc.com) for many years now – its up to v2.0 now and a very well rounded and totally stable app. It is IMHO the best mail / newsreader out there by a large margin and a real bargain at 29 USD. It is secure, has great threading features and the ability to set up complex filters, plus its usenet features are unsurpassed. Another email only option is the free Pegasus Mail app available from www.pmail.com it is IMHO no where near as intuitive as Agent, but is a powerful email app and is totally free. pmail has been around since the dawn of time. Both products are immune to any of the mail delivered viruses unless you deliberately ignore the warnings and physically run an infected attachment, and if you do IMHO you deserve what you get!

Tony.

 

Well . . it is free after you have paid for their OS

Microsoft warns windows users to patch machaines now!. It must be bad because it was on both the UK R4 and WorldService news this morning.

Auric

 

I've never protected my home PC in any way whatsoever, not that i use it much. It still works ok, though it sometimes acts in a parculiar fashion. Does that mean i've been lucky, or that in fact there are likely to be millions of viruses spiralling out of control inside of it, yet they are all benign, or just waiting for a prime moment to strike and melt the hard drive? What do viruses do anyway? It all seems like too much hardwork this protection malarky.

At work, someone else gets paid far too much money to take care of all that.

 

Re: Well . . it is free after you have paid for their OS

It was also the front page headline in today's "Metro" newspaper

Still, I fail to see how a decently setup firewall wouldn't prevent this problem

Michael.

 

Did anyone's Windows Update service automatically pick this one up? Mine didn't, I had to visit the M$ site to get it...

Tony.

 

Yep - had two critical updates (relating to the current issues) waiting to be installed last night

You may have disabled the service that automatically looks (and potentially downloads) new updates. Even if it's running it's configurable to either:

- do nothing
- just notify you updates are available
- download updates automatically and notify ready to install
- download and install automatically without telling you anything

Michael.

 

That's what I was worried about as I have been optimising my PC a fair bit lately, but I have 'Automatic Updates' and 'Cryptographic Services' still set to automatic in serrvices and turned on in Control Panel – I was under the impression that was all Windows Update needs to function. Does it use anything else - any idea whether it uses the QoS packet scheduler in Networking or the QoS RSVP service at all? (I binned them both!). I'm getting no stop errors or other indications anything is amiss in the event log from anything, let alone Windows Update.... a weird one.

Tony.

 

I don't think it needs any of those QoS services. The options are configurable through one of the Control Panel applets but I can't remember which off the top of my head.

Michael.

 

Tony,
I to have Automatic Updates turned off but then I make a point of visiting the MS site each day along with Adaware, Spybot and GriSoft looking for updates. This only takes a few mins and I do it while lunching and listen to the R4 and the WorldService news.

Auric

 

zonealarm keeps telling me that people are out to get me. is this true or is it trying to justify it's own existence?

 

I haven't played with one of the third party firewalls like Zone Alarm for ages now, but I remember years back they were stupid enough to report legitimate things like reverse DNS lookup from your email server as being an attack. This led to a sense of paranoia in users who didn't really understand the internet which I suspect they and many other companies cashed in on. One of the things I like about XP's build in firewall is that it just stealths all the ports and doesn't panic users with things they will probably misinterpret.

If you are getting a lot of “attacks†from one given IP address I'd try chucking the IP address into www.samspade.org and hitting the 'do stuff' button – you should be able to deduce from the results what it is at the other end.

Tony.

 

At work, we have to fill out a "timesheet" each week with the project codes of everything we've worked on (utterly useless bureaucracy IMO but there we go) - what amused me this morning is that they've added a new project code:

"TCINCDT02 - MICROSOFT PATCHING UPDATE"

So now there's a whole project code devoted to plugging the holes in the boat! Since we (the company I work for) are a massive customer of MS and on all sorts of early access and support programs (eg, I've spoken to the developers who wrote Excel in order to get a problem solved and they made changes to XP at our request ) I don't imagine the company are too impressed. Wonder if they're going to tot up all the hours spent patching security holes and then send MS a bill

Michael.

 

via /.

Get another new project code and start Constructing a Corporate Open Source Policy, should get you lots of overtime!

Auric