~Vi said:
I run Norton AntiVirus, Spyware Blaster, SpyBot, Ad-Aware, and
Windows Defender, every morning. Do you experts believe I may
be causing stress to my Windows XP by doing this and might
these precautions border on "over-kill"?....
You might wear out your hard drive faster by performing a complete
virus scan on every file, every day.
What have you done regarding removing ALL old versions of your Java
runtime engine and making sure you only have the most recent version?
What have you done to update your PDF viewer to insure it's also the
most recent version?
A hosts file was also mentioned in this thread - do you have one?
Do you have a NAT-router (a $40 hardware device) between your
broadband modem and your computer? Or does your modem have NAT
functionality?
Does your modem or router have Wifi? Is it secure - or disabled if
not used?
Have you disabled uPNP on your router (if you have one) ?
Do you trust your DNS server? That is, do you trust that is hasn't
been, or can't be, poisoned? (Does anyone know if DNS poisoning is
still an actively used tactic these days?)
Have you turned off or disabled all unnecessary services on your
NT-based computer? Have you disabled the RPC service?