[Jomar]

Has anyone's security scanners been getting things caught during the holiday vacation time?

I changed my Zone Alarm settings to scan every day now.

And use manual scans too for spyware and viruses just to make sure nothing is sneaking on to my puter...

[mrsD]

any more. It really screwed up our laptop.

But I will say, that my Avast did go a bit bonkers just before Xmas... which it normally won't. It was on a site I was researching for here. I thought at the time it was a false positive, since Avast is very strict and often has those.

[Jomar]

I had problems when the XP SP3 update came along = with ZA, Dlink and my cpu

but now I deny the SP3 update when it asks if I want it and just accept all the other updates.
I do have to turn off my ZA temporarily so the updates will be accepted, but at least I finally got it figured out.
after a lot of frustration , searching and reinstalling 3x before I got it all sorted out..

I finally do proper back ups and have a recovery program and 3 copies of various back up programs LOL on a spare hard drive.

[XISLED]

in an ideal world we wouldnt have to worry about such things. but unfortunately we do.

so the best way and only true way to protect your computer from internet attacks and virus's is to not connect to the internet at all.

if you dont want to break your operating system.. dont turn on your computer.

and all will be fine.

as fast as an os or browser or any update to a program along comes a fix , a patch and so on to make it more secure.
but on the other side of the coin. so does another bug,infection,virus,trojan,spyware and malware.


how do we protect ourselve?

one make a fresh install of your os and all programsd you like the best. then on a seperate small external drive you make a ghost copy of your system..like a snapshot and keep that copy to the side just in case.

if you do experience a problems. do a system restor back a few days to see if that takes care of the problem.

run multiple drives and partitions to keep games, music, programs, videaos, pictures. all seperate so if one area gets infected not all do.

if your a geek you can run your drives ina raid configuration where you can have multiple drives being writtten to at the same time that way if one drive gets hit you have a backup copy or if a drive fails you have a drive you can just replace on the fly.


if your not a geek. get an external hard drive, a flash drive , andy thing to backup your information to. so when you do need to do a system restore god forbid. it wont take you a few days to do it.


good luck all


roger.

[Doody]

My head is spinning with all this talk.

My Avast went kinda nutty as well.

But I tell ya, this stuff really bogs down my computer, it takes forever and a day to load and forever and day to get the browser up and running. My settings in Avast, or ZA or something must be wrong. Drives me nuts.

[Jomar]

Doody,
what speed & memory does your computer have?
If you right click My Computer and then go down to properties {click} it should have it showing there on the General tab.

mine is 2.20 Ghz & 1.46 GB of RAM - it seems to be ok with loading programs and booting up at those amounts.


"My settings in Avast, or ZA or something must be wrong"
you aren't running both of them are you

Oh you might try to set it all back to the default settings, and see if that makes a difference.


If you have a lot of other programs loading automatically and running in the background,, that can be slowing everything down.

Is there a lot of Icons down in the right side bottom corner by the time display? in the taskbar?
Maybe we can help you figure it out.