internet explorer

[Denholm]

www.windowsupdate.com (Use Internet Explorer)

Press, "Custom." Make sure anything listed in the, "High Priority" section is downloaded and installed.

[doleboy]

It's not safe to use Internet Explorer, especially on XP. It's a direct system level link to your OS for any wannabe hacker.

  Don't talk bollocks. 

[drdeathx]

Get Mozilla Firefox and ditch IE! its  better!  

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/

[Fulmar]

The more popular Firefox becomes, the more it is being targeted by spammers and hackers.  Which is unfortunate.  I don't choose Firefox for security really anymore, but I choose it for the vast amount of handy plugins that are available for it.

My belief is, your risks on the internet and mostly determined and where you go and what you do.

[TilDeath]

Except they are only released on the second Tuesday of each month for the most part.

Which will end the end of April I think.  No more patches for XP

[TilDeath]

The more popular Firefox becomes, the more it is being targeted by spammers and hackers.  Which is unfortunate.  I don't choose Firefox for security really anymore, but I choose it for the vast amount of handy plugins that are available for it.

My belief is, your risks on the internet and mostly determined and where you go and what you do.

I agree about the plugins.  I do believe that FF is a much more secure browser given the addins like Ab Block plus etc etc

[Bino]

something i suggest people to do when they reinstall windows is to partition there hard drive into 2 drives.
u have a 80g drive so could do 30g for windows install and 50g for storage.the size of the partitions depends on what u have or intend to have installed on your drives.
if u install a lot of programs like games then u might need a bigger main partition but if u have loads of mp3's,video's or other things stored on your drive then u could have a bigger storage partition.

what this means is that if all Ur mp3's and movie's are on Ur d: drive when u reinstall windows these files will not be touched in any way so when windows is back on the files are allready there so no need to back these files up (always back up important stuff to disk no matter what though).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_(computing)
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/313348

Good advice, Hyster. 

The Windows admins at the last several places I've worked (I'm a Linux/Unix guy), always spec'd new machines to have at least two internal drives, one strictly for the operating system and another for applications.  Often, one or both of these "drives" would be RAID1 (mirrored) arrays. Makes maintenance easier, and avoids several kinds of problems.

[drdeathx]

Firefox over IE? be the judge but I like FF much better!

Check this link:

http://www.websitedesignpartners.com/firefox.html

[MrRiplEy[H]]

Don't talk bollocks. 

It's not bollocks. 99% of users who complain about spyware or viruses are IE users. Coincidence? I don't think so.

[MOSQ]

For sheer browsing speed I've found Google Chrome to be great. However it's still a beta, some websites look weird and it's missing all the cool plugins of FF. I really like the no frills clean look and speed though.

[Skuzzy]

It's not bollocks. 99% of users who complain about spyware or viruses are IE users. Coincidence? I don't think so.

Quite right, as most people use the completely insecure defaults supplied by Microsoft.  With the defaults, it is really easy to get a virus/spyware/malware.  Not just via IE either.  Outlook Express is also a huge gaping security hole.

Any application using the explorer libraries is also a problem, as long as you leave the "Internet Options->Security" set to the defaults.  Microsoft tried to change them once and it caused a massive amount of problems because suddenly things stopped working that use to work.

I cannot use another browser due to the Sun Java problems I had when I tried using it before.  If it could be cleanly removed, I would try it again, but it takes a complete OS reinstall to get rid of the Sun Java stuff.  As it completely takes over the Microsoft Java stuff it is not worth the risk for me to try it and run into those problems again.  Standards, that are not standards, makes one a bit nuts.

I do not run with the defaults and have never had a problem.  I do not bother with anti-virus or anti-anything programs either.  One thing about most software, there are always alternatives.  Pick what works for you best, but do not use the security defaults as supplied by Microsoft for the OS.