Windows 7 - It's not the SYSTEM but it's the USER whose the problem

oh, Atleast there was some use from my post

I do alot of shopping online. You can put your name, address and email on the vendor site and pay through Paypal. I also pay all my monthly bills online. Never to the individual site but all through my bank. This way I only have to trust Paypal and my bank, not ten different sites.

That's what I'm talking about, you do need an antivirus unless you barely do anything on the internet or never use removable media to transfer data (almost everybody does).

Amen to that, id always recomended AVG to everyone and had set it up on my girlfriends pc, i uninstalled it and was trying Zone Alarm for a week or so see how it went, stupidly allowed her to plug her Ipod into my PC and Zone Alarm caught a virus on there masquerading as an mp3... all the safe surfing in the world is great, but surely an antivirus is your "safety net" just in case? If Zone Alarm wasnt on there i would never have known... the only symptoms on her PC were lagging big time, but i put that down to it being an aging machine....

funilly enough, that was the day i went off AVG

very nice post with good key points. safe browsing should always be your number one defense against online threats.

If you're not using the internet to download porn, pirated music, games or movies, don't keep your computer connected to the internet 24 hours a day, are not connected to network with other computers, and clean your system regularly, I see no real need for anything more than the windows firewall and defender. MSE at the most. Just use a little common sense.

Maybe better leave it unboxed? This way you don't need even Firewall and Defender.

Hi all

Actually for a HOME computer I've never seen the reason for a Firewall - usually gets in the way when testing networking etc etc.

If you have a decent ROUTER which blocks all open Inward coming ports except the ones you allow like RDP I'm not sure what actual use the firewall is.

For a Corporate or business scenario with Interconnected networks then it's a different ball game.

Something like MSE will prevent unauthorised changes to registry etc etc.

Cheers
jimbo

well i use Zone Alarm Personal Firewall basically because it tells you whenever something tries to "phone home" and block it, its amazing how many things try to connect to the internet during installation, example games, nearly all the installers try to phone home without needing to, Windows Firewall lets them through because it trusts them, ZA asks each and every time

Hi there
I usually install stuff on a Virtual machine first with NO internet connection.

If the software works "as it says on the tin" then I'll migrate it to a real machine.

I'm not a gamer so I don't have the problem with games "phoning Home" every so often but even here you can set your router (at least decent routers) to only allow certain programs through -- hardware firewall.

IMO this sort of stuff is done much better by the hardware since it's unlikely a hacker would be able to get into the router's Bios.

Decent Routers these days have this facility built in together with decent logging so you don't need an EXTRA windows firewall.

Cheers
jimbo