rand0mne55

[Tahrey1043]

This is a placeholder for something interesting and "offtopic" I thought of earlier but can't remember, as the bloke came to pick up the gearbox and derailed my train of thought straight off that big viaduct in northampton. (need to have a little think)
Still, here's a couple other ponderables

In the meantime, anyone got any tips on how to de-spybot / de-sasser-nate my computer... thought SpyBot SD and AVG were doing fine work at it til this week. Now media player's infected with some unhealable trojan and internet explorer keeps crashing out because of some strange DLL...

And is it possible to dry off grass using a garden-vac much like a giant hairdryer? The lawn seriously needs a haircut but it's kind of impossible when it's still got dew on it at 1 in the afternoon!

[Petrified]

On the spyware side, Adaware followed by Hijack This usually does the trick for me. Also try AVG in safe mode.

James

[Tahrey1043]

ah... sweet... you mean boot windows in safe mode so no nasty code runs... cheers.

then i might try checking out those other programs.

luckily it doesnt seem to have spread to this backup machine yet, though i think it high time to run windows update again

[Babe RuthLess]

It'll depend on whether you're running 98, Me, 2000 or XP, but for me it works like this:

1. Run Linux instead of Windows. I was forced to switch to Linux at work (I work for the Brazilian government) and was impressed. Good stuff, and you can copy ALL the software and bring it home without being fired.

2. Short of that, here's a few tips:

- start up windows, safe mode

- run either AVG or Avast! (www.avast.com) Personally I prefer Avast! but it's a matter of taste really. Both are excellent.

- restart, normal mode

- run Search & Destroy and HijackThis

- back up all the files that YOU consider important

- GET RID OF KAZAA, MESSENGER & other instant-messaging and P2P proggies, they turn your computer into a server, only an unprotected one without a highly-paid security expert minding all the ports

- install a firewall software, even if you're on dial-up. ZoneAlarm at www.zonelabs.com does the trick for me Windows machine. This is very important - if you had a firewall in place, SASSER wouldn't have got in your machine.

- install all security updates and service packs from windows update. Even if you're running a pirate copy, Microsoft will let you update it. DO NOT attempt to update a pirated MS Office though, or it'll cease working.

- stop using Explorer and Outlook Express and get Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird at www.mozilla.org instead. Why? Because most e-mail viruses explore Outlook's flaws, so if you use Thunderbird instead you're safer. These are 100% Windows, Shockwave and Java compatible (you may need to get Sun's own JVM from www.java.com)

- If you're not on a network, Win 2000 and Win XP run a lot of useless services that slow your computer down and make it more vulnerable to attacks. Go to www.blackviper.com 's Windows services page and disable the services that you don't need following BlackViper's guide. Use 'SAFE' mode settings.

I usually back up my files and wipe out my Windows machine once every two months. As you use windows it clutters up the hard drives and registry, so the machine gets slower with time. But that's me.

Also, check out the security settings on your browser and please set it to erase temporary internet files and accumulate as few of those as possible.
Also, please please use safer internet stuff like Firefox/Thunderbird.

Now...

I'm starting to get a grasp on Linux, after struggling with it for a while, so I can make a few comments in case any of you feel like switching in the future:

1. The decision to switch depends on whether you use the computer for games or not. SUSE Linux 9.1 will detect my hardware without problems (though my motherboard's ultra-ATA controller's still troublesome, just as it was under Windows due to a desing flaw) and it looks and feels great (very easy and intuitive really). BUT it won't run Sudden Strike 2 or SNES9x, so I'm not using it on a regular basis.

SUSE comes even with GIMP which is as good as photoshop (plus the plug-ins are free). I have yet to find a Linux DTP package though. The bottom line is, CHECK which programs you use the most and their Linux equivalents or versions before you switch.

If you use the computer mostly for Internet stuff and listening to music, writing text etc. then Linux should be great for you. Games are starting to appear but don't don't hold your breath just now.

2. Even though Open Office for linux is pretty much compatible with MS Office, there are still some issues plus you'll have to get used to the interface which actually looks nicer than MS Office but there's a learning curve there.

3. Linux is safer and more stable. BUT I must admit I'm only talking about Linux because the country seems obsessed with it and I was forced to work on Linux computers.

[Tahrey1043]

a short rundown of what i have

win98se, fully updated..... so hopefully its safe from both regular 98 hacks and of course the legions of people now trying to hack XP and forgetting all about 98

avg 7, though not a fully registered one ("yet"). doesnt seem to be working so well any more.

spybotSD. would be helpful if they were to update sometime this year, but then, it's a free service

a wireless router incorporating a hardware firewall. it actually blocks MORE stuff than i want it to (bloody thing) but i cant tell how much its letting through that it shouldnt. try to run as tight a ship as i can, but its hard as im not an admin and cant devote more than a small percentage of my day to it either.
Might get ZoneAlarm as well, though I know it has problems with various software and i might end up having to disable it now and then. Not 100% sure I do have Sasser.... my friends who have it keep getting shut down; with me, it's merely internet explorer crashing a lot because of some 'new' dll doing bad things.

i do have MSN.... been meaning to get Trillian for a while instead though, which is hopefully a little more secure. Haven't got most P2P programs any more. Wouldn't touch Kazaa with a pole since about jan 2003, it just went to hell. Still got Direct Connect though - seems alright, though it doesn't work too well with my router so i dont run it much any more. Got enough tunes and vids to last me a couple years of constant spare-time viewing and listening, which is surely enough.

think i'll tryout avast and hijack-this now
(mmm, mozilla, i dont need to avoid it now my hard disc is big enough to hold it dont use outlook anyway though)

you reinstall every 2 months? wow either your very fussy, very concerned about security, or get hit A LOT It took me 2 and a half years and a few changes of hardware and software for windows98 to get unusable (and before then, win95 kept going 100% fine til it couldnt support my hardware any more), and i think that might have been a driver bug.. reinstalled it a couple months ago, and i dont expect to have to do it for another 2 years


a couple of PS.....

* nothing in the world could get me to touch Sophos AV again, so please, don't try. It's like suggesting me to try AOL (sorry all aolers )

* i'll switch to Linux when someone can get me linux-compatible versions, or at least suitable replacements, for all my current software. what I tend to use:
MS Word and Excel, Works, Powerpoint (mostly as a viewer), Publisher (for fax cover sheets mostly these days!)
Autoroute
Paintshop Pro... i dont know how much its been updated, but i sure know opinion is highly split how usable the GIMP is, especially in comparison to windows apps.
Winamp
Media Player with Divx, WinMedia support
Cool Edit
Musicmatch jukebox as a "fast" CD mp3 coder (cross-platform Lame as quality one, so no worries)
Acrobat
Nero
Various pieces of hardware that probably havent got linux drivers included with them - printer, scanner, wireless LAN card, flash memory sticks, surround sound and 3d support for my (now fairly old) sound & gfx cards
DVD smartripper
TMPGEnc
Virtual Dub
MSN Messenger
Various games (but not often - only a few, mainly old 3D things like Driver, or DOS games from Railroad tycoon and Civ 1 through to GTA 1), and things that may get downloaded from (trustworthy) websites

I assume it has things like notepad, calc, solitare, browser, DVD players readily available so i'll skip that.

If I can find "good" replacements for the above (80% as quality or better, on an arbitary scale) so I can linux without having to lose capability or dual boot, that'd be cool.

Even better if i can squeeze a try-out install onto a 2gb disc.... or a 10gb at the outside... and it's not too difficult. I could just about cope with DOS - when I was 14. Now I can about manage CD, DIR, DEL(TREE), FORMAT, FDISK... thats about it.

Lalala

Oh yeah it'd be nice if it could read/write fat32 partitions, because otherwise theres a whole LOT of data to convert to linux disc format. Like, over 100gb, which cant be a speedy thing.

[Babe RuthLess]

Hm, OK.

I spoke to my brother, who works in programming and lives for computer/techy stuff, and this is what he told me:

- Win98 isn't exactly safer than XP, but if you're not not experiencing any instability then it's OK. If it ain't broke don't fix it, right?

- If AVG isn't working then try Avast! but don't set it to maximum security mode as it's usually overkill and will take up a lot of resources.

- SpybotS&D is fine for catching spyware, but to improve system performance you should try TuneUp Utilities from www.tuneup.de. It'll clear your registry and improve things a bit. The gain would be more noticeable if your Windows were 2 years old...

- Zone Alarm is a must if you share a wireless LAN/internet connection. It can block some apps but it's all a matter of setting up the software permissions - there's a control panel for it, plus you can tell the thing to remember your answers when it keeps prompting for your permission to let other software access the network/internet. Get Zone Alarm basic for free, it's enough and Zone Alarm Pro has a lot of bells and whistles but it's basically the same thing.

- Mozilla is big, all you need is Mozilla Firefox which is a great browser-only app. That's what I use at home with my Windows machine. Keep in mind that some sites thatl work with Explorer don't work with Mozilla and vice-versa. That's mainly because Mozilla has a built-in pop-up filter, and some sites infuriatingly open on pop-up windows. You can turn that option off though.

- Sophos is a pain in the a**, agreed. Avast's received some great press and I like it, though I have yet to attemp to uninstall it. All I know is that I NEVER managed to uninstall ANY anti-virus software (norton and mcafee being particularly infuriating in this respect)

As for the reason for my constant clean-ups , here it is: I live in an apartment building that's 21 stories high. It's got 4 apartments in each floor (plus a couple of duples penthouses on the 21st floor). All of them share the same cable internet 'routing' or whatever. Can't remember the exact term but it means we're basically 84 homes sharing a network with the cable internet provider in the neighbourhood. So I'm told the building shares its internet with at least a few other nearby buildings and shops. Not the best situation, security-wise. I only found that out last year when I installed Zone Alarm under coertion from my brother.

My computer had had the same windows installation for 2 1/2 years, since I bought it in early 2001 (yep it's an old banger Athlon 850), and it was full of 'holes'. With firewall software I found out my ports were scanned about 2-3 times a MINUTE at night and during the weekends. As I do all my banking and most of my shopping online, plus there's a lot of material here that I'd like to keep, I became a bit paranoid with security. At least I think that's being 'attacked' a lot both from distant machines and my cable provider's other clients (sometimes the neighbours' computers are visible in the local network area...). Plus my bro knows these things and usually does the maintenance for me after I back up my files.

About Linux, he tells me there are apps for most of the things you listed, it's a matter of testing the different options and finding the best ones. There's a lot of investment in that stuff at the moment. I have to work with it and don't mind, then again when I need to edit videos I have macintoshes available so never bothered to look for video stuff for Linux.
(I HATE Macs tho)

[Tahrey1043]

- Win98 isn't exactly safer than XP, but if you're not not experiencing any instability then it's OK. If it ain't broke don't fix it, right?

Well... yep
It's stable enough for me (though occasionally i have to run a memory-retriever in difficult periods), don't think i've actually lost any work with it in quite a long time. Certainly a whole lot better than 3.1 or 95 .... plus it doesn't have the sheer resource-suck of ME, 2000, XP.. (I had to donate a 128mb chip from mum's 98 pc to my aunt's ME machine recently - ours had 256, hers had 64.. it was a nightmare. now it's 128 and 192, the 98 still outpaces M.E and is "quieter" with the disc).
And as yet, no software or hardware issues, not major ones anyway. I have to install drivers for flash memory keyrings and there's one or two programs that have XP-only versions, but on the whole it's OK.
Oh yeah, and I can't use any hard disc bigger than 250gb... but as it's compatible with all RAID/SATA cards, and I have a beefy power supply, and a case that has 7 (count 'em) 3.5" hard disc slots... that aint exactly a problem.

(now i'm just waiting for SATA version N to come along and become ubiquitous in everyone's machine... can you say revelations? yeah bwoy)

- If AVG isn't working then try Avast! but don't set it to maximum security mode as it's usually overkill and will take up a lot of resources.

I wouldnt say 'not working' as such... just not able to pick up/heal some of the things infecting my system, even with near-daily updates. Plus it's somehow dropped out of registered mode (well... it *thought* it was registered) and gone back to being shareware, which runs out in a few days. Suppose if it's an antivirus util, you can expect it to realise during a certain update that it's been given a false code!

- SpybotS&D is fine for catching spyware, but to improve system performance you should try TuneUp Utilities from www.tuneup.de. It'll clear your registry and improve things a bit. The gain would be more noticeable if your Windows were 2 years old...

Looking now... I do tend to run a fairly 'clean' and tuned windows (with tweak UI, manual registry hacking etc) but anythings worth a look.
And there's some things spybot can't catch... the DLL making windows crash turned up to be in an oddly named folder in Program Files (ChinCreative, or Bicycle Soap Noun, something like that) which could not be deleted at all without doing a "safe mode command prompt" boot up... Still can't figure out how it was triggering itself, nothing in startup/registry/autoexec/win.ini or system.ini, must have actually altered Explorer's code or something.

- Zone Alarm is a must if you share a wireless LAN/internet connection. It can block some apps but it's all a matter of setting up the software permissions - there's a control panel for it, plus you can tell the thing to remember your answers when it keeps prompting for your permission to let other software access the network/internet. Get Zone Alarm basic for free, it's enough and Zone Alarm Pro has a lot of bells and whistles but it's basically the same thing.

Well... I suppose I can *try* it

- Mozilla is big, all you need is Mozilla Firefox which is a great browser-only app.

OK then.. (well, all my PNGs will work right!)

- Sophos is a pain in the a**, agreed.

It was the default thing reccommended and supplied free by my uni's IT department. It made me want to slap them all. It was useless at picking up viruses (generally whenever a Nimda trickled through the network, into my one and only read/write folder (which I checked often!), I had to delete it manually because sophos never spotted it... there were a couple people on the LAN with sophos and several thousand (literally!) of those email worms - they had a zillion folders with one in each!), but was a complete Nazi over not allowing you to do certain things.

Such as load anything off your CD drive. ANYTHING AT ALL. It 'locked' the drive for reasons only known to itself and satan, probably not even to it's programmer. Floppy drives and certain network connections some days, too.

And then when I got a better antivirus, it couldn't be uninstalled. Basically I had to remove the program files in DOS and then edit the registry, and there were still some remnants popping up here and there right until I wiped the disc, 8 months after I left and more than a year after I "killed" it.

Avast's received some great press and I like it, though I have yet to attemp to uninstall it. All I know is that I NEVER managed to uninstall ANY anti-virus software (norton and mcafee being particularly infuriating in this respect)

I wonder what AVG might do if I try to get rid of it.
What's Avast like on the free-software front, and/or how much to buy/subscribe?

As for the reason for my constant clean-ups , here it is: I live in an apartment building that's 21 stories high. It's got 4 apartments in each floor (plus a couple of duples penthouses on the 21st floor). All of them share the same cable internet 'routing' or whatever.

I keep hearing of these mysterious LAN-ified apartments from various locations around the world, but there's nowhere both within 1000 miles and 5 degrees north (i like warmth!) of my current location... Sounds like a cracking idea so long as you can keep it secure.

My computer had had the same windows installation for 2 1/2 years, since I bought it in early 2001 (yep it's an old banger Athlon 850)

Which one of us wrote that, again?

With firewall software I found out my ports were scanned about 2-3 times a MINUTE at night and during the weekends.

Yikes... and that's not just people seeing if you have any shared folders with good stuff in?
Think I remember having Norton Firewall on for a while (when there was only one cable-connected machine in the house) and it had similarly frightening statistics. I might ask my hardware firewall to start logging port-scan attempts...

As I do all my banking and most of my shopping online, plus there's a lot of material here that I'd like to keep, I became a bit paranoid with security.

Indeed....
Mind you any criminals would look at my banking and credit card records and just move on There's easier, richer pickings (e.g. people who won't soon be £500 over-drawn) elsewhere.

(sometimes the neighbours' computers are visible in the local network area...).

You ever click on them and see if anything's shared? It's a great way to swap tunes etc without having to bother with Kazaa and the like. Very, very fast as well (10-100mbit/s during quiet periods, compared to your average 0.5-1.5mbit cable). The security of such stuff is terrible though .... you can put them to read-only without any kind of enabling password, but still, there's probably easy ways to hack it.

About Linux, he tells me there are apps for most of the things you listed, it's a matter of testing the different options and finding the best ones.

Gaaaah... I already did that for 2 or 3 years with windows

then again when I need to edit videos I have macintoshes available so never bothered to look for video stuff for Linux.
(I HATE Macs tho)

Agreed
They seem well set up for video editing... or maybe that's just where all the software writers focus their attentions because they know "creative" people like the swoopy macs
Just as all the hardcore coders will focus on Unix/Linux PCs (and to a lesser extent, Macs - with OSX and so on) for heavy serious software (e.g, the 3D body scanner that's in the hospital I'm working in come september), and home/office/games writers look towards windows PCs.

The interfaces I've dealt with on Macs, and on a couple Linux machines (X-Windows, and... er.. something beginning with "K") are pretty horrible though. Microsoft may have plagiarised almost everything it's made, but it's in a combination that's left out many of the bad points and kept the good. I'll attack them on principle and on bugs, but when it comes down to the User Interface design I can't complain....... much
(well, there's the little matter of the UI not being set as real-time, so it can freeze up for a few minutes when a broken CD or Floppy is accessed, or when a very hungry app demands CPU time... that's the main thing. Oh and you have to enable either active desktop or a 3rd party util to use JPG/GIFs for the background, which slows everything r i g h t d o w n)

oing

[Babe RuthLess]

What's Avast like on the free-software front, and/or how much to buy/subscribe?

It's free for home/single PC users. You have to register and they'll e-mail you the registration number, which is valid for a year and gets you the free updates.

[polopowah]

cant fault ad-aware, just run it every so often and it completely cleans out all of that useless spyware
another annoying thing is the amount of pop-ups u get with broadband, i now use 'smart pop-up blocker' which is nifty and runs in the background zapping every pop-up
-Ben-

[Tahrey1043]

Babe: Wicked, thanks
PP: Doh, knew I'd forgotten something. Got ad-aware installed on one machine (and totally forgot about it) but not on the problem computer. That's another free one if I remember right?



edit: Mmmhm, adaware picked up 20 things that spybot missed... useful!

And I still havent figured out the offtopic topic.. doesnt help i was half asleep when it cropped up though. maybe something about cheese