I've been busy upgrading my web site with a new shopping cart (someone please revive Dave T. as I'm sure he just passed out).
DaveT has been on the verge of passing out for the better part of a day -- but for a totally different reason.
I'm in the middle of an equally major computer update. Just got a brand-new PC to replace the six-year-old model I've been using. Moving everything to the new PC has been a trip. I haven't done this in over four years, and it includes a major OS upgrade as well (98 to XP-Pro). I'm probably about half done now. But I think (hope?) the hard part is done. I have a network connection and my main browsers and emailer working now, and have moved my mailboxes, address book, and bookmarks -- and all are working fine. I assure you they were NOT working fine a few hours ago. I've been on the phone with tech support twice today.
Actually, it was never the computer's fault that I was having problems. Much of the difficulty turned out to be a battle royal between XP and ZoneAlarm. I know I've been a big defender of ZoneAlarm in the past. I still think it's great, but I probably won't be using it on the new machine. Here's the problem I ran into:
* Windows XP-Pro has a built-in firewall. I turned it off so I could use ZA as my firewall.
* A lot of installations require reboot, and -- loading a new machine -- I was of course doing a lot of installations.
* The first such reboot after I installed ZA and disabled the XP firewall, the machine got completely out of control. It would boot to the point that you had some control, but the load-at-startup programs were still loading. As soon as ZA put up its "loading now" banner, the machine would crash and begin another reboot. Something in ZA was conflicting with something in XP.
* Of course, this made it impossible to fix, because it was never up long enough for me to remove or even disable ZA, so the machine was in an endless reboot cycle. Part of the problem seems to be that the XP firewall comes up ON rather than the way I left it when I shut down the machine.
I eventually learned from Tech Support how to put XP into Safe Mode. After that it was easy to fix. But the fix was to remove ZA. According to ShieldsUp, the Microsoft firewall seems to be protecting me from outside probes as well as ZoneAlarm did. But it does not protected from trojan horses. (Explanation: the ZA program control screen requires you to explicitly permit a program to call OUT of the computer; it isn't just INWARD protection like the XP firewall. So if a trojan (adware? virus? etc) got on your machine and tries to call out:
* The XP firewall would never know nor care.
* The ZA firewall would ask the user for permission, and block the call without explicit permission. No, it's not really that annoying. It pops a permission window. You can say OK, No, OK for all time, or No for all time. The "for all time" responses give blanket permission or denial, and that program never pops the permission window again.
Bottom line: ZA is a better, more secure firewall, but it can't coexist with XP.
DaveT
-- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.308 / Virus Database: 266.7.1 - Release Date: 3/9/2005
