Floating Life

Back in December I posted Cyber condoms? 

With so many dodgy things out there on the Internet all of us (especially those using Windows) need to practise safe surfing. What protection do you use? Yes, there are firewalls, but I’m afraid having tried a few and found they have their downsides I use the one XP comes with. Given that of course, I need extra protection, aside from anti-virus where I have opted for Avast!. So I have Spybot Search and Destroy and Spyware Blaster…

So I installed Spyware Terminator, but opted eventually to get rid of the security guard toolbar that comes with it…

In addition I have McAfee Site Advisor on IE; it is a bummer trying to hook it to Firefox I have found so there I opted for WOT, reviewed here...

Now with all that installing and uninstalling my computer would simply not function without Ccleaner, which very smoothly removes the stuff uninstallers leave behind…

I finally succeeded in getting the McAfee Site Advisor to work in Firefox. Keeping WOT as well and another program called Finjan…

Finally, a registry cleaner that is free, does not seem too aggressive, yet is thorough. For sure the Toshiba is working better for its ministrations: Eusing Registry Cleaner. That’s a very thorough review of it.

All the items mentioned are free.

Over a month later and I am very happy with all those. But I have more! Both are really good.

– Belarc Advisor “builds a detailed profile of your installed software and hardware, missing Microsoft hotfixes, anti-virus status, CIS (Center for Internet Security) benchmarks, and displays the results in your Web browser. All of your PC profile information is kept private on your PC and is not sent to any web server.” Works very well.

– Secunia PSI, “an invaluable tool for you to use when assessing the security patch state of software installed on your system. It constantly monitors your system for insecure software installations, notifies you when an insecure application is installed, and even provides you with detailed instructions for updating the application when available.” This I only added yesterday, and it found a number of holes to fix, and how to fix them, particularly in places like Java and media players of various kinds. The scan took just three minutes; the advice was excellent. I strongly recommend it, as do most reviews: here and here, for example.