Re: So much for Windows XP being spyware free...

Mayor of R'lyeh wrote
(in article <herqu1ts140h76jilerls1jc6ho2rpa9mu@xxxxxxx>):

He asked me what I used and I told him. He then asked how he
could purchase a Mac, and I told him. He's sick of having to
deal with this stuff. Everybody he knows has the same slate of
issues, and there isn't any point to it.

Here's the problem. I've got a router. I use Spybot, Ad-Ware and
Norton's Corporate Edition. That's it. I occaisonally get a bit of
ad-ware or a virus caught by one or the other but not any great
amount. Nothing has ever infected the machines I have at home.

I suspect it has a lot more to do with the specific web sites
you visit than the apps being used, and going with Firefox over
IE would probably afford some additional protection as well.
However, this guy is working on his PhD, and he's literally
using the computer for doing research and working on his phud.
He's trying to set some record for the oldest guy to get a phd
in the shortest amount of time or something. Total workaholic,
doesn't have time to waste screwing around. I was a bit
surprised that he bolted to the mac that quickly myself, but I
think he's heard the same happy stories from others in the
department before me, and this was sort of the last straw, he's
under the gun right now to get some aspect of his research
completed in short order and on a short fuse. Under the
circumstances, I can't say I'd feel differently, unless I had
zero funds to spare, and he doesn't have that problem. If he
did, he'd probably be running OpenOffice, Firefox and T-bird
under Linux right now.

I run all three of those software packages every night on an automatic
timer at times when I'm not using the machine. They seldom turn up
anything.

Well, spybot was added into the mix today, I always ran spybot
myself in the past and had good luck with it, so that's why I
"phoned home" to it in this case. I had also heard good things
about Ad-Aware, but never relied on it myself. Maybe that's the
source of the problem, but the point of it /really/ is that
neither should be required. Microsoft should have been able to
plug this spyware hole YEARS ago. Everybody else did. There's
no reason for someone that doesn't own stock in Microsoft to put
up in that crap anymore. There are alternatives, and they don't
require you to know about virus, spyware, safe boot F8, registry
run keys, windows update glitches, and the host of other gotchas
out there unless you are just in dire need to advocate a
platform because you use it and feel better about your own
suffering when you get with others to pretend like its golden.
Not everybody is, or wants to be, a computer geek and subscribe
to a bunch of RSS feeds to keep up on the latest trends in how
to "un***" yourself with Windows.

Now you're not George Graves, Sandman or Alan Baker,etc so you've got
some cred. However I've got to wonder what your friend is doing so
horribly wrong. IME its pretty simple to stay bug free.

What he's doing wrong, is he isn't focused on arming his castle
fortifications against spyware, he's focused on doing work. He
isn't a computer guy, but he's not stupid, working on a PhD in
physics, not exactly your typical redneck browsing for porn
between bouts beating his wife. Hell, I have a masters in CS
and took honors math and physics (undergrad) and can't even read
the "overview" part of his papers without my eyes glazing over.
But, his focus is on things other than zit-faced third-world
hackers trying to drop turns on his file system daily.

Especially since he
isn't bought into reams of third-party commercial software, he
uses a web browser, email and a word processor. That's it. It
couldn't be simpler, and yet his machine is crawling with bugs
after owning it for about a year, and despite running recognized
virus and spyware software at his expense on top of the system
price.

Does he update it ever?

Yeah, he knew to do that much, as I said before (I think) he had
active subsriptions to Norton, and they were up to date, and his
Ad-Aware had been updated in the last week when I checked that
as well. The root cause may be that there is a large class of
spyware that Ad-aware simply doesn't glom onto. He does tend to
hit research sites in foreign countries, it may be he's picking
up a nastier set of gremlins than most people encounter
(although I wouldn't expect physicists to have a lot of evil
websites set up anyway). If it was a few items I wouldn't have
been surprised, but he had a shitload of them, and the system
ran about the same as a time-sharing cyber with a thousand
people logged in during peak time. It was, without
exaggerating, unfrickingbeleivable. I can't recall the last
time I saw a windows system that was less responsive. Of course
Spybot fixed it up, and he's "immunized" for whatever that's
really worth and maybe he'll be ok for a while. Of course, in a
few weeks when his iMac shows up, he won't care anymore. Maybe
I'll talk him into selling me the box to run Linux on, I can
always use another one.

It appears that Microsoft and ATI simply dropped support for
that particular card under XP and if you install the update, it
immediately trashes your video. Perhaps ATI just wants to sell
more video adapters.

I even tried doing the update again after reverting on the
off-chance that we just got a bad driver, and it happened again,
so I backed off once more. I'm hoping that automatic updates
won't try and shove it on anyway, as I don't think it puts on
hardware driver updates unless you go through custom manually.

It sounds like my experience with ATI. They have a long history of
writing crappy drivers. That's why I go Nvidea everytime if possible.

Well, I have an ATI in this Mac, but since the driver for it is
built into OS X and works fine, I can't complain. On the
Windows side, I've always used nvidia since I went past the ATI
Radeon 9800 AGP 128MB I had in my Dell. For Linux, Nvidia can
be a pain in the ass and ATI works well for the most part. So,
it's a mixed bag really. Before that, I always used Matrox
cards and had mixed results there as well.

--
Lefty
All of God's creatures have a place..........
..........right next to the potatoes and gravy.
See also: http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/images/iProduct.gif

.

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