Life is a State of Mind

Gah, I find myself once again dipping a toe into the murky waters that make up the Windows(tm) experience.

I consider myself extraordinarily fortunate that I have not had to touch any MicroSoft crap for many years now… but I inherited an old Compaq desktop and my boss suggested we put XP on it so I could do the occasional web-form written by idiots that require MSIE as the only browser. It makes sense. I can also test websites I make for MSIE compatibility (since IE can’t handle CSS properly).

So I find myself setting up the whole uber-paranoid security software suite because Windows is so vulnerable… and I discover that my information is dated… I last dabbled in the Win 98/SE era. Yikes.

Update: I have a much newer page of XP information available here. The rest of this post is for posterity only…

Here is what I have so far:
Firefox 2.0.0.1 (secure and CSS aware browsing)
Ad-Aware SE Personal 1.06 (generic spy-ware/mal-ware remover)
Spybot Search & Destroy (alternative spy-ware/mal-ware remover)
McAfee VirusScan (corporate license, thanks to the company I work for)
cygwin DLL (because I still type like a UNIX/Linux geek)
putty (because Windows Telnet/Terminal sucks enormously)
gvim70 (because vim is better than notepad)
Opera 9.1 (alternative fast browser for low memory Windows boxes)
VideoLAN 0.8.6 (best media player with no spyware in it at all)
Synergy 2 (lets me treat side by side desktops like a two headed machine, cut & paste and same mouse/keyboard shared over both monitors/machines)

It appears that ZoneAlarm is no longer essential because the built-in XP firewall is pretty good, but is that really true? I really liked ZoneAlarm’s program manager, which prevented bad Windows software from getting out to the network… not sure yet if XP firewall can do that.

XP has a built-in graphic file viewer, so IrFanView is not needed anymore.
XP has a built-in xntp network time protocol client, so Dimension 4 is not needed anymore.

SecureCRT and NetTerm are competitors with Putty - looks like they all work equally well.

What other suggestions do people have?

What makes your Windows XP box useful?

A few months ago I volunteered 2 hours of my time as a computer geek to a charity auction, and lovely L.G. won the auction. So Saturday morning found me helping her with her IBM Thinkpad A20m (P3 @700MHz, 256MB, 40GB, XGA, Win2000 Pro). I found myself impressed with the hardware, that this laptop made in 2000 was still running strong and quite useable after 5 years of use and abuse. That is remarkable for a Wintel box. While I am still using my 9 year old SGI O2, and 7 year old Macs, typically a Wintel clone is useless after 3 years. So this old A20m is remarkable, for it’s hardware.

Windows 2000 Professional is another story. As usual with Windows(tm), there is no security at all, so L.G.’s browser (MS Internet Explorer) had been completely hijacked by some weather toolbar that kept over-writing her registry. McAfee, Ad-Aware, and Spybot S&D were all finding this annoying application and deleting it, but it kept re-appearing through IE every time we rebooted. I suspect we’ll have to back up her data, re-install Windows, then restore only certain files. It is incomprehensible that people are not taking legal action against the companies that make this software that effectively steals their computer.

We had to settle for installing Firefox and Opera, and showing L.G. how to use them instead of MSIE, then installing ZoneAlarm, Ad-Aware, Spybot S&D, and updating her commercial copy of McAfee VirusScan (thanks AOL - best thing you’ve ever done for your members); and showing her how to boot safe mode and use McAfee, Ad-Aware, and Spybot from safe-mode. We also installed VideoLan because WMP and RealPlayer are both spyware of a sort too. I’ll be investigating how to cheaply upgrade to more memory and an external backup drive for her. I am so glad I no longer waste my time with Microsoft’s miserable excuse for an operating system, how frustrating. Updated (12/20) research is that she can get up to 512MB (two sticks of 256MB PC100 SODIMM 144pin) for about $96 and an external backup drive (40GB EZ Backit Pro) for $89.

I know I am engaging in post-mortem equine floggery, but Rob Pegoraro over at the Washington Post agrees with what techies have been telling the computer shopping public for several years now: choose a Mac over a PC as your home computer. The nice thing about Mr Pegoraro’s article, is that he’s a much better writer than most of us techies, and he sums it all up very succinctly when he says it is no longer a case of “why should I buy a Mac over a Windows PC?” but that it is now a case of “why should I buy Windows at all since it is so insecure, so unstable, and after years of patches it remains insecure?” - Bravo.

Mr. Pegararo also gets points for mentioning the Sony decision to include what is essentially a trojan horse rootkit on some of their new audio/music CDs, a format previously thought safe from viruses and malware - and true ISO 9660 Audio CDs are, but Sony/BMG/Epic/Columbia music CDs are no longer standards compliant.

More fallout from the Sony/Columbia/Epic/BMG XCP rootkit exlpoit is detailed on Wired (first time I’ve read Wired in a while). Yikes, the after-effects of such a stupid corporate blunder, compounded by so many people running their MS Windows systems effectively wide open (no security to speak of), are turning out to be huge. Hopefully there is a very real cost from all this that is billed to First4Internet, Sony, and Microsoft. BoingBoing has a nice map of the spread of the infection here.

If you want to find out the impact to yourself, the EFF has a great quick page describing which CDs are infected. Basically only CDs made after March of 2005 have any chance, and apparently only a few of them.