[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by SameOldStory

I know, I know. I should switch to Linux. Linux has no viruses.

Linux has exploits. They are much rarer.

The question I'd ask is how your A/V and firewall got changed when you didn't do it. That's nasty.

I tried to help a friend who got bit, and the underlying problem turned out to be a rootkit, with the solution being new machine. (She was planning to upgrade anyway, just not as soon.) She's pretty savvy, but went to Europe, and her cat sitter apparently used her machine to visit places he shouldn't have gone to while she was away, and got her machine infected with something.

I run Win XP SP3 here, with auto-update turned on so it's fully patched.

Symantec Corporate handles A/V, but seldom finds anything (and the last things it did find were false positives generated by ancient MS-DOS programs.)

There are three firewalls: a hardware firewall in my router, Windows firewall, since it doesn't conflict with anything, and the last freeware edition of the old Sygate Personal Firewall (which was bought and killed off by Symantec), which has the best interface I've seen in a firewall. It gets knocked for failing "leak tests", but those all presume you've been compromised by something that will try to turn off your defenses and phone home. I find it easier to not get compromised.

I have Malware Bytes and a few other things as well, but they never find anything either.

And I use Firefox with the NoScript add-on, that blocks scripting unless the site is in a whitelist, so I largely thumb my nose at web based exploits.

It's amazing how many people have an unthinking, irrational hated of Microsoft.

Sometimes it's not irrational and unthinking.

MS gets slammed in two different areas: crappy code and business practices.

Most of the crappy code complaints I'm philosophical about. When you begin on 16 bit micros with 1MB of total address space and a single tasking OS, and progress to 32 bit (and now 64 bit) machines with gigabytes of address space and a full multi-tasking OS, and attempt to retain some level of backward compatibility, you get unavoidable glitches.

I'm also not bothered by the continual flow of security patches. Most of what they patch isn't bad code: it's code written when developers never dreamed that malicious folks would do things like deliberately try to overflow a buffer to cause chaos. "Never trust your data" is a lesson everyone had to learn the hard way. My only real complaint is that MS should have emphasized security and started issuing patches rather earlier than they did.

I have Ubuntu Linux here, and get regular security updates for it, too. The main difference is that I don't worry if I don't apply an update immediately, because the circumstances under which the flaw the patch fixes can bite tend to be rare, and not things I'll normally encounter.

I am unhappy about business practices. Windows Vista is a case in point. The single biggest problem was that it was stuffed down the market's throat too early. It needed a newer generation of hardware to run acceptably, and a lot of what was in the pipeline when it was released wasn't up to the task.

It didn't get released because the market needed it: it was released because MS wanted to retire XP and create a new revenue stream.

To its credit, Windows 7 seems to have polished the rough edges, and the machines is is being bundled with ca run it effectively.

In fact it looks like Apple is getting big enough to draw that kind of knee jerk reaction too.

Well, it's popular enough to draw attention, so it's no longer bulletproof.

And Apple's "Have it our way!" attitude can grate. Apple has always positioned itself as aiming at the non-technical user, and trying to reduce what the user has to know to use the machine. It does so fairly well, but if you are a technical user and want to pop the hood and fiddle, Apple can get in your way.

It's amazing how some really smart people can be so childish and stupid.

They may not be as smart as you think they are.
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Dennis