Babe RuthLess wrote: - 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
