der.hans wrote:
> A quick question for those who use m$ desktops . . .
I run XP Pro for a couple hours a month, mostly to load the security
upgrades and format one newsletter in Word. I don't hesitate to go
back, but rarely stay for more than an hour or two.
At work, I'm on XP Pro all the time, with X to Solaris and Linux. We
use Outlook extensively. Our sysadmins are very, very good. Viruses
and spam are filtered at the Mail Server (but I never expose my work
address to the outside so I don't know for sure how good that stuff
is). I have never seen a virus scare at work since when? Melissa? And
they do have laptops and wireless, but are very strict with them. I
have Firefox as my default browser at work, and the "ieview" plugin --
excellent! -- to pop me over to IE for a few intranet apps that require
it, for example MS Project Server or (gag!) VSS. Internally designed
apps that have expected IE in the past are targeted for standards
compliance.
I use XP Pro remotely at home, via Cisco VPN and rdesktop from Linux.
It'll never lay a finger on me. :-)
> do you still have to run anti-spyware and anti-virus stuff all the time?
> If you do run them, do you constantly find stuff that needs to be
removed?
I am currently running PC-Cillin Version 2 at home. I have always kept
some sort of virus scanner around on Windows, since the time I got bit
by the Monkey-B boot-sector virus from a friend's floppy disk some 10
years ago. We had only one family PC with four or five users over
several years, but we were never victimized by any virus.
I run periodic AdAware and Spybot Search & Destroy. They never find
anything, maybe one or two tracking cookies at the very most. The only
time I've had a problem was some five years ago when I used Webshots.com
and ZoneAlarm asked me if some program in the C:\TEMP directory was
allowed to access the Internet. That was my encounter with Gator -- it
never got off the ground, and I found instructions to remove it by hand.
My wife runs another box with Win98se, Thunderbird and Firefox. Yeah,
she uses IE sometimes too, but very conservatively. She doesn't even
have a virus scanner running, her machine is too slow (Pentium 166 --
but it was pretty snappy when it was running 17 hotel-shopping domains
with 6000 properties worldwide under FreeBSD! Such a come-down for a
noble servant.). I scan the box now and then, and do the MS updates.
AdAware finds tracking cookies, that's all.
I mentioned this to my sister recently. She said she had just spent
several days recovering her system after it was wiped by a virus, and
that she had been using computers for years and was no babe in the
woods, and that she wished I would not be such an arrogant, superior
blowhard, or words to that effect.
I agreed. OSS can do that to you . . . :-(
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