-Worm and Virus Wars- the August Edition--
General advice? Set Ad-aware and Spybot to their advanced modes ( go to the SWI forum that has a link near the end of the above post to learn how... it's in the "pinned" forums in Malware Removal ) and run them after rebooting in "safe mode."Be sure to check for & get the latest updates. And AVG's anti-virus software found and removed a file every other anti-virus had missed, FWIW.
Quit using Internet Exploder as far as possible... you will need it for a few sites, but Firefox, Opera, Mozilla, or even Netscape have fewer problems- at least until the vermin start coding for them.
Diddle E., I put Firefox on both home machines last week ( yes, I had all kinds of nasty stuff sending my browser to X-rated sites... ) and I've been very pleased. It's small, it's fast, it will import bookmarks when you first start it from other browsers already on your machine, and I've quit getting mailicious cookies and other nasty stuff since starting using it.
Ernest_at_the_Beach can tell you more about Firefox, but it's easy to use-- just remember "right-click is Advanced Windows" and you'll find all sorts of neat features.
And finally, I'm looking at three CD's I just burned of MandrakeLinux that I am seriously going to put on both home machines- dual boot, either Win2K or Linux. I hate to make this old brain learn another OS, but it can't be any worse than the hours I have wasted cleaning up messes left by Microsoft's carelessness.
Suggestion -- install Windows first. I recall reading several years ago, that during installation Windows would wipe out any other system it found on the drive. Caveat: I have no personal knowledge whether this is true or not. (The last time I set up a dual-boot system was in '98.)
I've used Mandrake and RedHat for years and generally liked them, but I recently dumped RH9.0 for Knoppix after I saw a big increase in performance in the latter using their LiveCD (which I subsequently installed). Thinking now of moving over to straight Debian.
I tried Mandrake for Windows about 4 years ago and found it to be very user friendly. I had a pro install Redhat for me on my home machine that's networked and bought a new modem. I've never been able to get it to network properly and gave up on it. If I went back to Linux, I'd go with Mandrake, but last I looked my modem wasn't supported.