Wednesday 28 April 2004

  • MSN Mobile Momentum - More Useful Every Day reminded me of A Hard Day's Night. 


    Tonight I came home to the sound of something whirring.  Disconcertingly, it was my DVD player.  I couldn't get it to stop with the power on or off, nor could I get it to open.  So I unplugged it for a few hours. 


    Then, I turned my computer on only to find a trojan trying to install itself while my firewall was loading.  Now the dang thing has installed all sorts of things on my computer.  Looks like I'll have to reformat this.  I hate having to do that.  Stupid Internet.


    Well, it looks like the DVD player will work now.  So at least something is going right.  :-


    I was originally going to post a review of our Wasteworld adventures, but I no longer feel like it.  Maybe later this week. 


    "Before any cosmic act of reform we must have a comic oath of allegiance." - G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Comments (3)

  • Eek.  Trojans so completely suck.  We got one once - it installed itself in the boot sector of our harddrive and we ended up having to reformat everything.  Not fun.

    For what it's worth, a really good free firewall is Zone Alarm.  You can get it at Download.com.  They'll give you all kinds of promises about ZoneAlarm Pro, but from what I understand, unless you're doing heavy-duty security and secrecy stuff, the free version works just fine.  I've never had a problem with it, and we've stayed virus-free since we got our cable-modem.

    Another thing that works - and I've just recently discovered this - if you use the IE browser, download and install Avant Browser.  It's basically an IE upgrade that stabilizes the browser and makes it more user-friendly.  What's really cool is that it has an option to turn off Active X.  IE uses Active X to allow and run all kinds of programs in the background without you seeing them.  I used to go through and clean out ALL of that stuff on occassion, because much of it is spyware and webbugs, etc.  It's also one of the biggest security breaches to any PC.  With Avant, you have the option to turn that off.  Suddenly your downloading rate is MUCH faster.  You can also block pop-ups and flash ads.  It's SO nice.

    Heh - I sound like an advertisment.  The thing is, I wouldn't share if I didn't like.  That, and I think taking those two simple steps will save you a lot of trouble next time. 

    And, of course, if you already know about and run this stuff, ignore everything I've just said. 

    Good luck!

  • Yeah, the firewall I use is ZoneAlarm, but like I said the trojan started installing as Zone Alarm was opening.  That's the fault of a cable modem, I'm connected before all of my startup programs are launched.  So now I flip off the modem until ZoneAlarm is done opening.  It's an annoying extra step to take, but apparently its mandatory.  Everytime I turn on my computer now it automatically does a scandisk because of disk corruptability, so I suspect I'll be having to format soon anyway. 

    Avant sounds interesting.  I think I remember you bringing it up on the PFF boards before.  If I have to reformat, I'll make sure to try that out.  It sounds cool.  Does it use tabbed browsing like Mozilla?

  • Mozilla is awesome! I use the standalone browser (Mozilla Firefox) which also has a nifty little checkbox "block pop up windows." I used ZoneAlarm for a while (with my DSL) but my PC never seemed to be the same after installing it. I think ANYTHING installed on top of WinME messes up your 'puter. Oh well.

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