I go one step further to protect accounts, passwords, and sensitive personal info. I set up the computer that connects to the Internet with its hard drive in a drawer so I can easily *remove* the hard drive when I need a secure system.
Say I've been reading email (with the hard drive connected) and need to make an online purchase or banking or whatever. I shut down the computer, disconnect the hard drive and reboot from a Ubuntu Linux LiveCD. At this point the computer is known clean and there's no way anything can be saved on the boot disk (it's a CD after all). After finishing my business all I need to do is log out of the bank's web site then press the computer's power button to shut it off -- I don't have to do a proper shutdown because there's no way I can corrupt the CD by not allowing the system to do a clean shutdown. That saves a few seconds. It *is* annoying to have to shut down and reboot, but the knowledge that the system really is clean makes it worth it. Even if you boot from a CD it *is* important to not have a hard drive in the computer because if there's a hard drive, the operating sysem will save stuff on it and use it on later boots -- precisely what I want to avoid. Oh yes, what about the stuff I want to save? Most of the time it's not needed, but for that which is there's always floppy disks or USB flash RAM. You can be sure I check them for lurking viri, trojans, or whatever before using them on another computer, then do a full erase when I have transferred the info. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe by mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], with 'unsubscribe filmscanners' or 'unsubscribe filmscanners_digest' (as appropriate) in the message title or body
