On Tuesday 24 August 2004 10:33 am, Kaj Haulrich wrote: > 1. A good, reliable firewall for Windows (preferably OSS and free) ?
Zonealarm is free for personal use and is supposed to be as good as personal firewall solutions go. Keep in mind that trojans, worms and the like often shut those off from the inside, thus they are limited by nature in protecting your system. You would be much better off to get a good standalone router to put between that and the XP box. Better yet, put a Linux box between the net and the XP box. > 2. A spyware/trojan/worm cleaner capable of removing all malware ? Spybot Search & Destroy, Adaware, and couple that with a good antivirus package. Grisoft's AVG Anti-Virus System: AVG passed Virus Bulletin's June 2003 VB100 Windows XP test (the most recent available at press time) after failing previous attempts; it also passed ICSA's June 2003 test. AVG includes memory-resident scanners, plus e-mail scanners for Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, and Exchange client. Alwil's Avast 4 Home Edition: Avast likewise passed both the VB100 and ICSA tests, and it offers memory-resident scanning. But Avast surpasses AVG by scanning both Outlook and standard Internet (POP3/SMTP) mail, making it a good choice if you use a non-Microsoft mail client. Amazingly, Alwil also offers support via e-mail for its free product. H+BEDV Datentechnik's AntiVir Personal Edition: This utility doesn't appear in Virus Bulletin's June 2003 tests; it did, however, pass ICSA's June 2003 tests. AntiVir includes a memory-resident scanner, but it lacks e-mail scanning (it watches only file read and write operations and looks for suspicious macros). You can use AntiVir's separate scheduler program to launch scheduled hard-disk scans, and virus-signature and program updates; but how to perform these tasks (or whether they're possible) is far from obvious. Softwin's BitDefender Free Edition Version 7: BitDefender Free Edition does not appear in the VB100 and ICSA test results, but the Standard Edition passes both tests using the same scanning engine as the free version. Like the other free AV tools, BitDefender employs a memory-resident scanner and is set to download updates automatically. But like AntiVir Personal Edition, it doesn't scan e-mail for viruses during send and receive operations. -Courtesy PC World. > 3. Shutting down the whole kaboodle and wait for SP2 ? I wouldn't count on SP2 to protect your system. From my reading, it is not really adding anything close to good security for that OS. -- Bryan Phinney
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