My patching to Windows XP Service Pack 2 went fine, no problems at all system wise. The security centre seems a good idea, along with the increased prominance of security in general. There are still three omissions though:
- A safe webrowser. IE is not safe, use the free and great Firefox instead
- Antivirus. (Not anti-virus and the plural is not Virii, it is Virus.) Choose a nice free package from either Grisoft or Avast!
- A decent firewall. The XP firewall would be fine if it stopped rogue data getting sent from your PC as well as stopping it from getting in. This is a stupid omission and can only be explained by Microsoft’s desire to let software phone home. Get the free ZoneAlarm or Sygate
I forgot one, pointed out by 3ADay:
- Email. At home try not to use Outlook or Outlook express as virus writers target those and your wide open for all sorts of nasties. Thunderbird provides a free and far more secure email service. The huge bonus with moving to Thunderbird is it also provides a decent junk mail filter.
XP is for the latest games, OS X is for everything else.
1 response so far ↓
1 FryGuy // Aug 10, 2004 at 2:32 PM
Your blog was featured on 3-Blogs A Day. I hope this gains you some readership and exposure.
Thanks,
smmFryGuy