Oh Mid-Aer's

If anyone has any questions feel free to PM me or post up in here. I'm an IT consultant for a living and have worked as a consultant for IBM on several government (US Army) projects including working with them to secure their environment and pass a security evaluation. No need to go into other qualifications but I've been doing this for awhile.

For starters:

1) Nothing is wrong with Windows XP, provided you are on the latest supported Service Pack (SP3) and keep it patched. Anyone that says otherwise really is pulling that out of their ass, sorry. Windows XP is easily one of Microsoft's most successful operating systems and is still used abundantly in the corporate environment. You can secure Windows XP just as well as you can Windows 7 (IMO) though most end users are not going to be able to do that.

2) Decent anti-virus that's free? Microsoft Security Essentials. I've used Kaspersky, Avast, AVG, Norton (home use edition), Symantec (the corporate edition), McAfee and any other antivirus solution you can probably think of. In terms of ease of use and updating as well as being free, I haven't found one better than MSE.

3) Browsers? Really up to personal preference, I like Chrome for the post part, it takes care of updating Adobe Flash Plugin on its own (big vulnerability on machines) and is not too resource intensive. Firefox is better than Internet Explorer but I've noticed it taking up more resources than usual, I've migrated away from using it.

4) Browser Plug-ins? Adblock Plus for Firefox and Chrome will help out tremendously in cutting down on browser clutter and security risks.

5) Additional 'security' software? MalwareBytes, etc. I don't use them and don't think you need to. If you have a decent anti-virus and keep Java, Adobe Reader/Flash/Shockwave as well as Windows updated you really won't have many vulnerabilities present.

That's just a few of the things I've seen from reading over some posts, if anyone has any questions just post them.

 

I don't think that was his point, in the event the operating system is compromised or corrupted, having your pictures, music, videos, etc on a secondary drive is a pretty good idea and is what I do. Disabling auto-play would immediately solve most viruses from self-executing if you plug in an external drive and allow you time to scan the drive to verify it's clean.

And from what I've seen, unless it's a really really nasty trojan/virus it tends to stay where system files reside, and not explore outside of that.

 

In our house ...

Operating System: Windows 7 ... not absolutely stellar in every way, but notably better than at least two or three predecessors.

Anti-Whatever Suite: avast! ... started with the free version on two PC's; when we added a third PC, we bought the three-machine license, a bargain for full suite use. No issues. If you have always-on scanning, files will be checked with each use, which costs some speed. We also use Malwarebyte's Anti-Malware on occasion. (Norton, McAfee, and a couple other 'famous name' anti-everything suites are truly machine resource hogs! If trial versions didn't come with new PC's, these might die off in the general consumer market.)

Browser(s): Most sites work well on any major browser. My workplace old external email wouldn't work well in 'Internet Explorer 8', had zero functionality in 'Internet Explorer 9', but would work in 'Firefox'. I've been to a couple fed/state/local government sites (USA) or commercial site pages that specifically handle payments that would work very well in 'Internet Explorer' but would fail in 'Firefox'. We keep multiple browsers available on each machine and do not rely in all cases on just one browser. (If you were looking to place blame, I would complain to the website architects that built thier sites to work well with only one browser.)

Advice: Whatever you do, NEVER, NEVER, NEVER select 'yes' or 'scan' or 'speed up my PC' to any pop-up ad that tells you your PC is infected or slow and can be 'cleaned' or 'fixed' for free by clicking a button in the ad. Other 'free' things to avoid downloading: screen savers, calendars, 1001 emoticons, cute little games ... almost all these things install stuff on your PC that YOU DON'T WANT and that they generally don't tell you about (unless it's in some fine print or user agreement that you generally don't read or understand all you're 'allowing').

Even when allowing legitimate software to install, I choose 'custom installation', if available, and then de-select most, if not all, the toolbar, add-on and free email options.

 

On to point 4, I have a question...I recently had a virus and knew I had to reformat and start from scratch. However, Gateway didn't ship me a copy of my Windows installation discs with my purchase, so if I reformatted the drive via external USB then I wouldn't be able to install the OS again. So I went through Gateway's built in restore process that wiped everything clean and basically returned it to the state I bought it. Do you think there's any way a virus would be able to infect that secured Gateway partition on the hard drive? Or do you think that was good enough to get rid of things?

 

Good question. I'd say it's unlikely, but it's VERY difficult to know for sure. How is the OS stored on that restore partition? If they're just bare files loose in a directory, or even zipped the malware/virus could have easily seeked system files out by name and modified them. Typically, though, they go after system files in known locations.. Additionally, does the Gateway process do any integrity verification during restore? It's possible this is built in but I just wouldn't know. You could boot the system with a live Linux CD and compare file hashes to a known good copy. But, that's exhausting work. IBhashcollisions...