Jeremy

Do you have any idea how brutally this topic has beaten and maimed to death in the last 5 years? Do yourself a favor and search. There's got to be dozens of topics on this forum alone... Welcome to MSFN.

Download the Ultimate Boot CD 4.0 from here, burn it to a CD, boot to it and do a MemTest.

When you install Windows, it will ask you to activate it. You should be able to do it online and if it doesn't work then call the number it gives you. I've done this quite a few times for peoples' Dells and whatnot.

I originally saw this over at NeoWin. It's a 450 KB portable executable. When I open it, it takes about 2 seconds to "enumerate" my partitions. The GUI (which IMHO is just fine) is basic: You can backup a file, an entire HDD/partition, or "NBD" (Network Bootable something?). You can either use no compression and have the image written as .img. If you use compression, you are given 3 options: gzip (fast), gzip (best) and bzip2. Here are the preferences: When I specified that I wanted to make a backup of my C: (active partition) onto my D: and use the best compression, it warned me: I clicked Yes and it started creating the backup. It is slower than Acronis but I'm not that impatient. For it to read 149 GB took about 10 minutes. It tells you how much data is read, how much of that is skipped free space, how much has been written to the image file, the speed (in real-time) at which it reads the data and the average speed overall. Here's the process, CPU, Memory and Virtual Memory usage: All in all, this program is impressive. It's about time people took more interest in providing others with freeware/open source alternatives for the commercial products we usually swear by. Granted it has its bugs and lack of other features, but all in good time. This is something I'm definitely going to keep my eye on. Homepage

UltraISO Screenshot

What a mentor style! Who you, teacher? And you expect me to be polite? What do you think about yourself? I will teach you how to use Windows. It's your happiness that I can't speak English. The can of spiders... Then make its defense satisfactory. I am not familiar with Linux, but you are. You can teach your wife and I'm sure it will make you two feel more connected. I don't need to be taut how to use Windows as I already know how. Now please stop whining and take action. I'm happy because English isn't your first language? Well, trust me, I don't know your native language so we're even. I don't mind the small spiders, but the big and hairy ones creep me out.

*Imagines a cult of dark and white hooded superhumans carrying Chi-Balls taking over the world*

False. Viruses are, to my knowledge, written for Windows, MacOSX and Linux. 99.9% are written for Windows because 95-98% of the world uses Windows. If Linux were in Windows' place, the 99% of malware would be written for Linux. I use my knowledge and experience to maintain security on several Windows machines and these systems don't get infected. It seems you spend more time complaining about something that isn't going to change anytime soon than actually doing something about it. How many people before you have done the same thing? Thousands. What do we do? We use good software and continue to learn more to benefit our experience and security. As mentioned before, teach your wife how to use Linux or take advice already given to you.

Don't come into any forum telling people who are trying to provide you with advice and answers to your questions to crash into trees because you do not live in a perfect world where PCs are immune to any malicious infection. You asked for security software, we provided you with freeware answers, and that's the end of it.

Test your RAM with MemTest86.

Pidiot, not everyone uses the same thing. You are dragging this topic way out of context. You even asked if there was any legals bounds to sue the companies who develop anti-virus / anti-spyware programs. The idea of a firewall is for you to be asked if something is OK, and if you say yes, it will not ask again. Comodo does that, but it also performs behavioural analysis and watches over the memory. If an application is modified in memory, which can potentially indicate hijacking via code injection, it will let you know. If you hate Windows this much, teach you wife how to use Linux.

The difference between free and commercial software will not escape you from the fact that if you open IE6, go to a porn site, click "Yes, I want that bouncing, flashing free laptop because I am the 999,999th visitor!" and then tell your firewall that it's okay for whatever is trying to access your system to do so, you will get a trojan or worm or spyware. If you do, you have to manually run a scan with Ad-Aware and Spybot. You cannot hide behind the illusion that simply having this software installed means you are invincible. I know using the software and security measures I recommend to others keeps you safe because I do not get infected. I have visited rated R sites in the past and downloaded EXEs from torrents, but as long as I take the appropriate measures, I'm fine. Opera Ad-Aware / Spybot Kaspersky Comodo Router

Pidiot, plain and simple on a Windows machine for security: - Use SP2 - Use NTFS - Use a freeware anti-virus (Avast or AntiVir) - Use a freeware software firewall (Comodo Firewall Pro) - Keep your OS updated The only thing that would cost you money is a router. Unless you have a second machine you can run Linux on between your cable/DSL modem and your Windows PC.

Garbage. Use this tool to remove it. Why don't you just use Firefox or Opera?

You want an anti-virus appropriate for 256 MB of RAM and you install Norton? Norton is garbage. Remove it with this tool. Also, you should be on SP2, not SP1. The updates can be configured to download and install automatically without user intervention. What you're doing the exact opposite of what you should be doing in order to maintain order on your PC.

CCleaner is a godsend as far as I'm concerned. It can save a lot of HDD space consumed by junk/temp/cache files many users don't know even exist and can remove the typical tracking cookie that Ad-Aware reports. It sure makes a defrag easier and quicker.

I think everyone knows by now the advantage of using a good password and the reasons for people not using a password, whether they know to or if they feel that their systems don't contain information valuable to those who would go out of their way to steal it.

Download and run Dial-A-Fix (check everything off) and click "Go". If you have Norton installed, please use this tool to remove it. Spyware: Download, install and update both Ad-Aware SE Personal v1.06R1 (or Ad-Aware 2007 Beta 4) and Spybot S&D v1.4. Do full system scans with both and clean/fix any infections they report. Viruses: Download, install and update Kaspersky Anti-Virus v6.0.2.621. Do a full system scan and let it clean anything it reports. Reboot if an infection cannot be initially cleaned/deleted. Kaspersky's trial lasts 30 days. If you wish to use this product for one year legally, use the AOL version labeled ActiveVirusShield. If you prefer freeware then use Avast! Home Edition v4.7 or AntiVir v7.00.03.02. The latter has an even higher detection rate than Kaspersky and NOD32. For more information about anti-virus products, please visit http://av-comparatives.org. Just trying to cover as many bases as possible.

IE is integrated into the Windows Shell, it cannot be completely removed from Windows XP. Those who try end up crippling their OS. You can go to Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs > Add/Remove Windows Components > Uncheck Internet Explorer from the list and click Next. Then delete all the shortcuts to Internet Explorer on your desktop and start menu. The more advanced method would be to use XPLite which is not free. Yes, I'm sick of software that isn't free also. If you're directly connected without any hardware based protection considering the growing threat of malware online these days, you need to at least get something. For example, a basic D-Link router is not expensive. And yes, running SP2 is important as well. Otherwise, your security is even more weakened. You basically buy one, plug it in and link it between your cable/DSL modem and your PC's ethernet port and you're good to go. Granted you would need to do some port forwarding in your file sharing program, but that's about it.

Use VirtualBox which is freeware. No you don't need a new license. You install Windows XP MCE virtually the same way you would locally and just take a screenshot of the Windows Logon screen.

Do not use Internet Explorer. Use either Opera or Firefox. If you continue to use IE, disable ActiveX, JavaScript and other script-related options under Tools > Internet Options > Security > Custom Level. However, many people do prefer the flexibility and customization available in 3rd party browsers. For further browsing security, you can download and install Sandboxie and run several applications from within one or more "sandboxes". Use either a hardware or software firewall, or both. You could use a second machine between your cable/DSL modem and your PC, run Linux or SmoothWall on it. If you're on wireless, I'd recommend a Linksys WRT54GL Wireless Router with the Tomato firmware. If you're on a wired connection I can't recommend much else than what I personally use which is a D-Link DI-604. As for a software firewall that is freeware, it's Comodo Firewall Pro hands down. Finally, use computer sense. Do not click ads on webpages, nor unknown attachments in e-mails. Don't go to porn/warez sites. Use the good software mentioned above. The idea is to avoid getting infected in the first place, not cleaning up infections after the fact.

Reformatting should be a last resort. Too many users decide to simply reformat when the smallest thing goes wrong and the next time it happens they don't know any better. So what's the problem? What I would do is: - Download and install Acronis Disk Director and Acronis True Image - Format the recovery partition, merge it with one of your other partitions - Make an image of your active partition (make sure it just has the OS and program folders on it), save it to another HDD (internal or external) or to DVDs. - Build the Acronis Rescue Media Boot CD and burn it to a CD. The next time some critical goes wrong with your OS, you will have the Rescue Media to boot from, point to your image and restore your OS within 5 minutes.

Do not format, that's always a last resort. So the process runs in the background but it doesn't appear in the taskbar? And you tried reinstalling it?

It has to be the kind of files you're trying to compress. I can't think of any reason why it wouldn't compress. You could try reinstalling the software or a different compression program like 7-Zip or IZarc.

Comodo Firewall Pro (freeware) Excellent program! For more information on firewalls, check out this link.