Hi,
My new system will be arriving shortly and although this question is a little
on the generic side I'm sure some will have suggestions that I hadn't thought
of. Basically, I'm polling to see which softwares people use to secure the
ship and keep it running smoothly. So far, it seems that the following are
necessaries:
Anti-Virus - seems like Norton's Corporate Edition does the job without
bloating things up
Wouldn't know. I run F-Prot (free DOS version that runs in a window),
AVG (also free), PC-cillin (it came with the motherboard and no longer
updates when I ask it to but you can download the updated files, unzip
them to the directory, and edit the ini file to make the prog use the
new file) Occasionally I run the Housecall deally just to see.
TDS is supposed to be the last word in trojan and worm killers.
They update their downloadable database files DAILY.
http://tds.diamondcs.com.au/
Firewall - not sure which is best here (I'll be subscribing to a cable modem
service through Adelphia) although I would rather take time to learn how to
set up a complex yet effective firewall than a simple one that leaves you
overly vunerable or overly restricted.
If it's a software firewall then ZoneAlarm. Pro costs money and has
more options but the free version of ZA is pretty good. Also it
catches spyware trying to phone home whereas a lot of cheap (but costs
money to buy) software firewalls only monitors incoming stuff.
Norton Utilities - people seem to say it is good for tuning a system,
especially the defrager, but all the added thingies negate the good it does.
Ran Norton from back when it was DOS based and before M$ scarfed up
Speeddisk. Haven't since.
Pop-up Stopper and Ad-killer - lots of varieties. I guess the trick is to find
the ones that do the job yet don't plant their own scripts/bots.
Spybot give a lot of options, but can nag you about your
Limewire/Bearshare directories/files.
Adaware does a good job.
Both have update options in the prog.
If you can add/subtract from this list please feel free and if you have a
favorite hunting ground (online or offline - I'm in southern California) for
this type of software I'd be glad to hear about it.
Dr TCP most definitely. Highly likely to speed up your cable
connection. Here's the premise; Winders comes configged for a LAN not
a high latency cable/DSL connection (you know the old lowest common
denominator).
I use the analogy of 2 guys unloading a truckload of gravel. One guy
is on the truck and the other on the ground;
Are you ready to catch gravel?
I'm ready
I have a piece of gravel to throw.
I'm ready.
I'm throwing the gravel.
I caught the gravel.
Is it the same gravel I threw?
It looks the same.
I have another piece of gravel!
Use Dr TCP to up the size of your TCP receive window to match your
cable connection. To return to the analogy, much better to throw a
bag of gravel at a time; less crosstalk and more gravel in the air at
any one time. It upped my DLs from 1.4Mbit to 2.8Mbit/sec
---------------------------------------
Atom Time Pro. Sucks the REAL time from an atomic clock in Boulder
Colorado. If you register it, you can set it to do that
automatically. It's nice to know what time it really is.
http://www.atomtime.com/
-------------------------------------------
startup.cpl. It shows what really starts when your system boots and
tabs it so show what section of the registry it starts from. Enable,
disable, delete, do whatever you like to 'em. You know every piece of
software you put on the system are all wanting a piece of the action.
For example I don't need some little piece of Quicktime loading every
single time I boot on the off chance it can get thru the firewall and
find there is a version 1.23456 to replace my version 1.23455. Same
goes for all those crappy quickstart options that software loads into
memory and puts down by the system clock to load .2 milliseconds
faster the one time I use it out of the 1000 boots that I don't.
http://www.mlin.net/StartupCPL.shtml
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XTeq. Lets you change damn near whatever you like on your system.
More options than any sane person will ever use. It also can be
configged to grey out the options that are not specific or tested on
your OS.
http://www.xteq.com/
---------------------------------------------
The old M$ regclean v4.1a is still a good thing to have around.
Expecially when you uninstall stuff and it leaves loose ends in the
registry.
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Can't be without my context shell extensions and property pages.
I have LOTS of 'em.
I get tabs for individual immediate virus scanning, dependancy, CRC16,
CRC32, MD5, and SHA1 checksum calculation tabs, filedate and time
editors, tabs for file viewers and Editors, tabs that show me what
icons are inside .dll and exe files and will extract and save them if
I want, indepth MP3 information popups, attribute editor tabs, tabs to
show subdirectory trees with the directories labeled by name and size,
context menu(right click) options to securely delete and overwrite
files, Select All in the context menu instead of going up to the top
of the screen for a dropdown menu,
That's some of my can't do without software....
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