OT: dead computer

Hi all. Haven't been on much lately as my home computer took a hike. Neighbor came over last week with a disk saying that their printer was having problems and could she print from our computer. I run Norton Internet Security and anti-virus but next thing I know, the security settings have been turned off and files are starting to vanish. Go figure... An update of the virus definitions and system scan showed no problem but either a file is messed up or the security has been compromised.

Am assuming that there was some sort of macro virus that came from the MS Word document.

I yanked out the drive immediately and plan to get a new drive and restore to that. Not too bad since there was only 300M free space left on the drive. Just annoying. With any luck, I can still recover my data files from the old drive.

Was also thinking of installing the new firefox browser. This is free from

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Is supposed to have all sorts of neat features and does not use the ActiveX that gave the MS products both functionality and security holes.

Oppie

Reply to
Oppie
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You might try using Knoppix to copy only the files you want over to the new drive. Personally I'd ditch anything Norton in favor of the AVG antivirus and ZoneAlarm firewall. Firefox is a good idea. Good luck!

Jerry

Reply to
Jerry Martin

I've been using Firefox since beta - it's faster and has fun plug-ins. Some web pages display differently because they say they don't follow generic html coding and somehow MSIE works with the non-standard coding better. This is my paraphrase, they explain better on the Mozilla site...

We have cable modem and because of its always-on status there's a hardware firewall (router), Windows update and Norton update are both set to auto-update. Then I used Spybot and Webroot's Spy Sweeper and Window Washer. Plus my fave for email is Yahoo since it blocks nasty attachments.

Sorry for the hassle, however getting new hardware is kinda fun too!

Reply to
Jonnie Santos

Reply to
john

Use AVG. Used to have it set for daily full scan, then begin to wonder how much disk life was being shortened just looking for some stupid virus. Now it's set to scan automatically twice a week.

Of course I'm behind both hardware & software firewalls set to "stealth" all ports, and don't do "risky" internet activities.

Reply to
Bill Davis

Firefox is great! It's much smaller and faster then IE, with most functionality. It is very rare that I come across a site I have to fire up IE to view correctly with it.

I run Symantec Antivirus Corporate 9 here at home. I've always been happy with their products until we've had recent worms running around the network at work that it doesn't pick up(mostly variants of WORM_SDBOT.XX(several variants) or W32/Forbot-S depending on who you ask). The sad part is these worms don't really function - they just try to spread themselves rapidly thereby creating DoS attacks. When we first had the outbreak over the summer it brought down all the schools in the county. The fix at that point involved applying necessary windows patches and removing all references to smsc.exe in the registry. I made a CD to do this and gave copies to our team and we systematically disinfected roughly 500 that had the virus of our total 700 workstations. Now I find variants of a similar worm, going by names of scvhosting.exe, exename.exe, spoolsv.exe and others. Very interesting that SAV doesn't pick any of them up.

Reply to
BANDIT2941

Not sure if you guys are recommending he buy AVG but if you are suggesting the free version (ver 6) you should read this:

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Apparently they are dropping support and updates for the free version at the end of this year. They will however continue to offer support for version 7 if you choose to purchase it. I'd hate to see you go through the trouble of downloading and installing version 6 to have support stop in a month and a half.

Reply to
Roy

They're dropping the free version 6.0 and upgrading to a new free version 7.x available here

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Thanks for mentioning it, wasn't aware of the upgrade.

Reply to
Bill Davis

Guess I'm a little jaded, I figured they were just like everyone else and were dropping the free stuff completely so they could grab more money. Didn't really look around after for another free one. Thanks for the info, gives a little hope to see that someone still shares (you and Grisoft).

Carry on.

Reply to
Roy

...don't remember hearing about AVG - I used to run something else before Norton/Symantec and my mind is just blank at the moment.

Reply to
Jonnie Santos

Then again, if you dump MS office, Outlook and IE you will probably never have to worry about viruses again :-)

Try Open Office

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it's come a long way in the last couple of years and is totally usable now, I like it much more than MS office, especially the spreadsheet program.

Reply to
Rev Turd Fredericks

Reply to
Jerry

re: Try Open Office

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it's come a long way in the last couple of years and is totally usable now

Cool - I just did the torrent dl and will give it a try - thanks!

Reply to
Jonnie Santos

Norton has done well by me or several years. For such an important piece of software, I never trust 'free' programs. Somebody has to pay the cost of development and maintenance.

Norton has proved worthwhile even on a dial-up connection where it has blocked break-in attempts several times a week. When I first got Norton, the yearly subscriptions were in the $10 range. Now they are in the $40 range which is getting to the point where it is worthwhile to hack a subscription (for some folks at least).

Another place where I was deficient was in not performing the MS Office update. Who knew that just doing the Windoze update was not a catch-all? Evidently, the Orifice 2000 suite that I was running (along with most of the MS virus vectors) has some big security holes that could be patched with updates.

Regards, Oppie '01 lw300 (and '99 e-Machine 366i)

Reply to
Oppie

Reply to
Blah blah

Not *directly* relevant, I know, but you do realize that 70% of all web sites out there are running on the Apache server...which is free.

Dav2.718

Reply to
David Hungerford

Brain just came back online... it was McAfee. Thanks...

Reply to
Jonnie Santos

Reply to
Blah blah

Wow, long thread for such an OT subject, lol! Anywho, before Saturn, not long ago, I was an IT professional. Here is my site for Windows Security freeware, hope y'alll find it useful!

I have been using AVG for years now, the new free ver is 7. I also use the free ZoneAlarm. But I dont think this would have totally prevented Oppie from a Word macro virus assuming that Oppie neglected to upload and patch his version of Office, which would have specifically blocked many virii.

I also highly suggest BigFix

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which will help you to keep your computer better updated with all the latest patches, including drivers and Office patches. Its free too.

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btw - pop-up warning, turn on your blocker. It was a free site :-)

Cheers! marx404

Reply to
marx404

Not to be rude or anything; but if you did IT contracting work, why would you stop doing that to take a measly job with Saturn?

Reply to
BANDIT2941

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