[Xanthe]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

I'd look at Ubuntu Linux. It does the best job I've seen in a Linux distro of figuring out what hardware you have, setting itself up, and Just Working....You can install it alongside Windows using WUBI. In that configuration, it actually lives in the Windows file system. Windows sees it as a big file. Booted into it, Linux sees that big file as a Linux file system.

Interesting. Sometime in the next few months I'm going to do a wipe of my laptop, so maybe I'll try out Linux then.

I like a layered approach, too. The question is how many layers you need.

I could drop a few I have now and not lose much sleep. For instance, with a hardware firewall in the router, I could drop the software firewalls on the desktop...are more for outgoing control than blocking incoming traffic...For that matter, I could drop A/V, save possible on demand scanning of downloads.

What nasties has it turned up? I never see anything real.

The layers that I have are the ones that are useful to me. As you said, with the router a software firewall isn't really necessary but I too keep mine to control outbound access by my programs. I have an aversion to programs calling home unnecessarily; I tend not to allow auto-updating of programs. I like to know when changes are being made to my programs.

I like WinPatrol because of the alerts it provides to changes to my start-up list and to various bits and pieces programs try to quietly add to IE and my computer. It also is a good information source for what's going on at the moment. Spyware Blaster is just set-and-forget passive protection, so it's not using resources. Mamutu is a behavior blocker/zeo-day monitor; it tends to provide alerts when programs have changed or when installations are doing suspect things. Zemana is behavior-based too, so it picks up on things that AV's tend not to. So those two programs are only activated when an anomaly occurs. There's actually not that much redundancy; it's more a matter of making sure specific security aspects that I'm concerned with are covered well.

I tend to try out a lot of downloads from various sites and sometimes the software is dodgey. So NIS does trigger alerts in that instance and they seem to be precise. Some AVs I've used in the past tend to automatically label everything a generic trojan or virus from those sites, when they clearly are not (and when they also test clean on sites like Jotti's).

I use auto-update, but have it set to let me choose when to install. I've never had an update break anything.

Well, that's the way mine is set up, because I have had updates screw up my computer. Vista is an odd bird. That's when I've given thanks for System Restore.