Guys as mischievous as yours truly would enter where the normal cyber angels fear to tread. That is, I would jump into a site that displays the digital Ouija Board or the Magic Ball for example and fool around with them as a diversion. Pretty dangerous thing to do since every one of them would immediately try to install all kinds of cookies and ‘global hook’s’ and whatnot’s besides into your system to check out who this guy is and what’s he is doing on the net. There are some pretty evil sites that could destroy your system as well.
The fall out is, the computer gets infected with all sorts of viruses, worms, trojans and the like. One likes the excitement alright, but not the fall out. Early in my cyber adventures and with the terrible Internet Explorer I used to have a nice time of closing down windows by the hundreds that would suddenly start popping up all over the place after a few such incursions. The system would finally stall or crash and I would have to clean the hard drive and re-install the OS from scratch.
The one good thing about the business was that I learned how to format the hard drive and do a few things besides on the hardware-side other than installing and uninstalling programs. I gained the experience through heart breaks and brain smoking hard work!
I still have the XP and haven’t upgraded to Vista or Seven. So programs like the windows defender is not integrated in it and its vulnerability is high. As for upgrading to Vista earlier, I hated the Vista somehow and thought it cumbersome and (at least to me) looked rather like a white elephant. So I had stuck with the XP though out the phase of Vista. The Seven seems better to me. But I haven’t still decided whether to go for it or not.
Sadly the window’s firewall was and is not something to rave about and then one has to ‘allow’ sites to access your system to download or even enter them because of the phishing filter and all sorts of security features in IE that do not really work unless you limit your activities to a very few sites.
What’s the use of security features unless you can fool around a bit. I mean, why start learning martial arts in the first place if you want to remain at home and daren’t venture out? Anyway that was my outlook as far as surfing is concerned and I had to seek free firewalls and antivirus software’s that would protect me even if I did some fooling around. Free because, the paid versions often stalls when updating and if you forget to buy a new copy the moment the old one has run out, you are in trouble.
So I got hold of a firewall that served my purpose then – none other than the erstwhile No 1 free firewall, the Zone Alarm. And I must say that initially it was comforting to have the thing in my computer and it was pretty good in screening threats and keeping the computer safe. I have written about it previously and that post had generated some interest back then and still seems to be the only post that is still visited by a few from all over the world. If had a genuine feeling for software related issues I would have taken to reviewing products, but my touch with the world of programming is rather non-existent. And I write on them only when I am totally pissed about something.
As I told you I had the Zone Alarm Firewall but it ran into certain problems when I wanted to reinstall it after a new XP installation. It started asking about a friend of it’s,named KB something and it had to be installed for the Firewall to function. I had the luck to find the invisible Mr. XP KB943232-x86-ENU and proceed with the installation of the Zone Alarm. But I don’t know why, things started to go wrong with the system sometime after wards and it began to show freak activity rather irrationally.
I am not saying that it’s entirely due to the interference of Zone Alarm. I used to tamper with the system on a regular basis and that could be a reason as well. Any way I tried everything to correct the erratic behavior of the system including uninstalling all the programs I earlier preferred. Instead of Zone Alarm I tried the new No. 1 and much sought after free Comodo internet security suit. Ever since I did that the system started behaving okay and is now comparatively dependable.
The Comodo has an antivirus feature integrated with it and that’s what gives me a few problems now. I can’t update it no how! I had wanted to try it on to check how it performs but, being stuck with a dial up connection I don’t have the speeds to download its mammoth data base and antivirus signatures. And I hear that it’s the case with those with broad-band connection too. Some are advising to try different servers to download the data base!
Well if anybody want to try Comodo as a firewall, I would not say no to it. If you can’t use the antivirus feature then you have other good free antivirus programs like, Avast and also Clamwin ( its open source and you might want to support it) if you want.
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