ECN Forum Forums Technical Discussion Re: Computers and the Internet Anti-Virus Software?.

I also use Norton, but I wanted to add that I am very surprised that no one here uses MaCafee. Does anyone use it? Thought that MaCafee and Norton were number #1 and #2 in popularity.

I just reformatted my computer (upgraded a model) and low and behold within 4 days the speed was getting slower and also freezing was happening when switching windows. I ran ad aware twice last night found some stuff but the performance did not improve. Downloaded spy bot search and destroy it found some major spy ware. this took about 30 minutes to run. Then another 30 minutes to (fix) my comp. ( I hate XP HEHE)
All seems fine now

is it worth getting firewall protection as well as anti virus? (i to use norton)

James (Jim),

Firewall protection is not that critical if you are using a dial up connection, as your PC's exposure to the nasties of the Internet are limited to the times you are actually online.

If you have an 'always-on' broadband connection I would highly recommend it. With most broadband connections your PC is exposed to the port scans and port probes that the script kiddies do twenty four hours a day. They are looking for open ports or other vulnerabilities to exploit on your PC.
The free Zone Alarm firewall ( http://www.zonelabs.com/store/content/company/products/znalm/freeDownload.jsp ) is just fine for most people. Easy to download and install.

Routers are another option. A very strong one too I might add. I won't go into a lengthy tirade here about routers unless someone asks me to. They are excellent at stopping unwanted inbound traffic, but they do nothing to stop unwanted outbound traffic. The plus side is they don't reside in your PC's memory taking up precious space.

Here is another useful link. Steve Gibson is a world renown computer security specialist. Follow the link below to his "Shield Up!" test page to have your machine tested for open ports and other vulnerabilities. It's interesting what you might find out!

https://grc.com/x/ne.dll?bh0bkyd2


[This message has been edited by Mean Gene (edited 06-10-2004).]

Another nice thing about a router (such as a DSL Router) is that you can very easily connect multiple computers to it and share your internet connection. Basically it acts as a peer-to-peer network, allowing you to share disk space, printers, etc as well.

Radar

Ryan,

I use it and have for years. I've had some weird problems because of it but have continued to use it.

(one version made my clock run slow!)
Recently I upgraded from ver. 6 to ver. 8, but because of some conflicts with Eudora, (my Email program) I had to go backwards to ver. 7. BTW, I did check into my problems with McAfee tech support and found out that other people had the same problem. They offered a ver. 7 download to whoever wanted it.

Bill

http://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/bagle_at.shtml

"Bagle.AT arrives in email as a packed executable. Bagle.AT can also spread with a prepended Windows Control Panel Applet (CPL) stub (see info below).

If system date is Apr 25th, 2006 the worm uninstalls itself from the infected system by deleting its startup key in the Registry and terminating its own process.

This worm uses several different icons for the attachments it sends, such as these: "

I have Kapersky on several of the machines at work and at home, some at work are running Norton Anti-Virus, and the kid's computer at home has Panda. Used to run McAfee, but had problems that wouldn't go away, but partly due I think to some of the apps I run here. Kapersky is one of the best around, not easy to set up, but updates available usually 2 times a day.