Toadfish Monastery

We seem to be missing an Open Water section for IT. I realise that continual frustration means we tend to use the rant and rave section however I am taking a calm and mesaured approach to my ongoing search for sanity.

Is Windows OneCare any good as a protection tool?

Seems to be working fine for me so far. Tried breaking in with nmap, various vendors online tests etc, without doing so, but only been using it for a few weeks.  It's also doing a good job at background disk defragmentation, which amazingly doesn't even seem to slow down my machine while it's running.

I've previously used Symantec (got fed up with their security holes and failed updates and attempts to make me buy new versions half way through a year).

Used Trend Micro for a couple of years but the latest version is reviewed as behaving like slowness inducing bloatware in various places.

Also played around with avg/F-secure/Sophos in the past on Unix and or Windows.

The three copies for £30 licensing of One Care and its minimal configuration is attractive to me as well; making it about a third the price of competitors. At work I'm used to fiddling around with Unix iptables rules etc but expect a domestic machine to do what's necessary automatically.

From what you've said in the past it might not give you the controllability you require over rules and reporting, though you can easily add udp/tcp inbound/outbound port allow rules through the firewall. 

edit:

O yeah, one thing I forgot. It downloads a lot of itself so I wouldn't want to install it on a non-broadband machine, and if you don't have a Microsoft Passport/Live Id or whatever it's called this week it will ask to set one up as a part of the installation.

Does it allow you to choose when it downloads itself? 

(Windows Update does, so I'd be surprised if it doesn't. On the other hand if it's taking a Big Brother line it might think it needs to do it the instance new updates are available.)

I can't see an obvious place to configure it, but it might be there somewhere.

Compared to other virus-checkers the ethos seems to be simplicity and ease of use over bells and whistles.

I'm off to rant and snark. Before posting here. Or I wont make sense. hehe.

Hello Sibs!

I don't know if this means anything.... I got a server down message not to long ago and went surfing elsewheres.

Then when I just clicked in here (3 mins agos) I had a look at "->Chant"...

I give it the finger and a window popped up inviting me to join something to make money at home or such..I closed it quick so I'm uncertain".

Was that normal?

Yes it's normal.

It's a box to chat in that MB organised.

It has a little advert in it so the people - Gabby - who "own"  it can make money - so don't click the click "here" - although that would only tell you more about it rather than drain your bank account as far as I can see.

I dont think anyone uses it. They seem to prefer the Chant Box at the foot of the page.

Quote from: beagle on June 18, 2007, 06:51:39 PM
I can't see an obvious place to configure it, but it might be there somewhere.

If it's totally non-configurable I wont like it although I'm prepared to sacrifice absolute power for the sake of something that actually does the job instead of driving me insane. The trouble with PF/AV is having to get rid of one to try another. And the trouble with that is there's no way to export settings. Or indeed, to import them. I sent Symantec a warning I was going to post their bugs all over the internet; that should scare them