Friday, December 02, 2005
Building new machines
In the past 6 months I have built 2 new machines and rebuilt my old machine and along the way run more setup programs than I care to remember. In preparing for this process I have dug through my archives of downloaded and purchased software in an attempt to identify only those programs I absolutely need and those which are useful.
As I am sure many people go through this process I thought I might dedicate a couple of posts to listing out some of those core software products and why I install them.
Let me start out a bit radical with Virus software ... How many times have I read that this is an essential piece of software that you must install yadda yadda yadda. Bullshit. Virus scanners are a scam. They slow down your PC and unless you are stupid absolutely useless.
I have run machines for almost 20 years and the last virus I saw detected by a scanner was back in 1990 when it was a boot sector virus on a floppy disk. While it is true that trojans etc can attack you if the following statements are true then I suggest you delete your antivirus, save yourself the annual fee and speed up your machine:
- Is you machine behind a NAT.
- Do you run a quality firewall (not the windows one).
- Are you smart enough not to download unknown email attachments
- Do you run spyware detectors.
- Do you use windows update to automatically apply windows patches
If this is all true then you dont need a virus scanner. If anything is not true either change yourself or stick with a virus scanner. AVG have a free one available.
Now that that is out of the way lets talk about firewalls. The windows XP one does not cut it. It prevents those outside your machine accessing you but once your machine is compromised it wont prevent adware etc from calling home. I use ZoneAlarm from ZoneLabs. I only use the free version but it offers sufficient protection to be worth the additional install.
Adware is a major problem these days and rumour is you should run multiple detectors to be sure. I run Adaware once every couple of weeks and SpyBot once in a blue moon. I cant remember the last time it found anything more serious than a cookie file but having seen what adware can do to a mates pc (I swear he had over 20 types installed) I think it is worth the hassle. What I also like about this stuff is it does not run all the time soaking up precious cpu cycles. Both of these products can be downloaded for free for personal use.
The final software product I want to talk about is autoruns from http://www.sysinternals.com . These guys produce a bunch of free utilities for the more technically minded user and autoruns is one of the more useful. These days every program you install seems to have some program that runs in the background with an icon in the system tray. These things slow down your machine and add little in the way of benefits in most situations. Autoruns can help you to stop these from running each time you log in helping your machine to run just a bit faster. Mind you autoruns is not for the fainthearted. These guys know their technology but dont write tools for novice users.
More next time.
As I am sure many people go through this process I thought I might dedicate a couple of posts to listing out some of those core software products and why I install them.
Let me start out a bit radical with Virus software ... How many times have I read that this is an essential piece of software that you must install yadda yadda yadda. Bullshit. Virus scanners are a scam. They slow down your PC and unless you are stupid absolutely useless.
I have run machines for almost 20 years and the last virus I saw detected by a scanner was back in 1990 when it was a boot sector virus on a floppy disk. While it is true that trojans etc can attack you if the following statements are true then I suggest you delete your antivirus, save yourself the annual fee and speed up your machine:
- Is you machine behind a NAT.
- Do you run a quality firewall (not the windows one).
- Are you smart enough not to download unknown email attachments
- Do you run spyware detectors.
- Do you use windows update to automatically apply windows patches
If this is all true then you dont need a virus scanner. If anything is not true either change yourself or stick with a virus scanner. AVG have a free one available.
Now that that is out of the way lets talk about firewalls. The windows XP one does not cut it. It prevents those outside your machine accessing you but once your machine is compromised it wont prevent adware etc from calling home. I use ZoneAlarm from ZoneLabs. I only use the free version but it offers sufficient protection to be worth the additional install.
Adware is a major problem these days and rumour is you should run multiple detectors to be sure. I run Adaware once every couple of weeks and SpyBot once in a blue moon. I cant remember the last time it found anything more serious than a cookie file but having seen what adware can do to a mates pc (I swear he had over 20 types installed) I think it is worth the hassle. What I also like about this stuff is it does not run all the time soaking up precious cpu cycles. Both of these products can be downloaded for free for personal use.
The final software product I want to talk about is autoruns from http://www.sysinternals.com . These guys produce a bunch of free utilities for the more technically minded user and autoruns is one of the more useful. These days every program you install seems to have some program that runs in the background with an icon in the system tray. These things slow down your machine and add little in the way of benefits in most situations. Autoruns can help you to stop these from running each time you log in helping your machine to run just a bit faster. Mind you autoruns is not for the fainthearted. These guys know their technology but dont write tools for novice users.
More next time.
