Paranoid enough?

[David O'Meara]

I was reviewing the protection measures I have on my home machine and thought I'd list them here and see if anyone has further recommendations. One problem with the list below is that I'm the only one who knows how to use the machine, my wife has trouble browsing the internet now!

AVG Free anti-virus updates every day at 4am, runs full check at 5am
Firewall (i forget which, I like low maintenance software)
Router with built in firewall
ISP blocks dangerous ports (80, 137 and others)
Firefox and the Ad blocking plugin
PeerGuardian to block site related to ads, trojans, usage clicking and other dubious sites
AdAware every fortnight or so.

In addition I still use IE, but only for 'untrusted sites' and it always get cookies and content removed afterwards.
I'm pretty sure there are some extras I can add to my tool kit.

[Rick Beaver]

The absolute best way of protecting your PC is to turn it off when you are not using it. I only turn my PC on when I specifically want to do something and only leave it on idle when I am doing a large download.

From your scanning schedule it would appear that you are leaving your PC on overnight. This is probably putting you at risk.

If you must leave it on close down your network interfaces.

My advice

[David O'Meara]

Yeah, I do tend to just leave it on and shut off the monitor. An interesting side effect I found is that the Adblock plugin for Firefox is nice, but it needs to be 'trained' first. I'm hoping there is a list you can download somewhere, but I've never seen it.

Anyhoo, the problem is that you have to first detect and visit a usage tracking site before you can add it to your filters. Using PeerGuardian, the offending resource will fail to load and throw up an annoying alert box, but then you can filter it and go on your merry way.

Oh, I also have a wireless network so I have an app that monitors network activity. Only useful after the fact, but I'd have no visibility otherwise.

[William A White]

I finally have a hardware combination that works well with power management, so I have my system set to go to standby after 5 minutes of idleness. It takes about 15 seconds at most to come back to life, and saves a few dollars a month in power bills.

[Rick Beaver]

Originally posted by William A White:
I finally have a hardware combination that works well with power management, so I have my system set to go to standby after 5 minutes of idleness. It takes about 15 seconds at most to come back to life, and saves a few dollars a month in power bills.

I too have hardware that will sleep and wake up in a few seconds. It is also imune to most forms of virus, spyware and adware.

I call it an "Apple"