Excellent advice to all. I think you missed the (not very obvious)
point above that I have the router, Norton, and all the other stuff
you mention. So far, I haven't had anything get in although I do run
Outlook Express. VBS scripts and anything like that just pop up in
Notepad and give me a chance to decide if I want to run them.

--

Roger Long



"Larry W4CSC" wrote in message
...
"Roger Long" wrote in
:

Zone Alarm

Zone Alarm, or any other program running UNDER the Swiss Cheeze
operating
system (Windoze) is useless, in reality. It keeps popping up those
panic
windows to keep you hooked up to its owners....or their spammers in
some
cases...

If you want to be safe? Put a net safe router between the broadband
modem
and the Swiss Cheeze operating system. Then "they" can't really get
at it,
because they have no hole into the operating system, unless the worm
running in your machine opens a hole in the router....

You can do a lot to protect yourself there, too. The worst one is
Outlook
or Outlook Express, the target email client of every cracker in the
world.
As it is PART of the operating system, directly connected to the
other
target, Internet Explorer, by design to give the spammers access to
every
private piece of data on your system, you can stop all this madness
by
getting rid of it....for free! Download and use Pegasus from David
Harris
in New Zealand. http://www.pmail.com/ Pegasus is one of the oldest
email
clients on the net.....and not connected to anything. It won't run
the
worms or even open the spammers' email bombs unless YOU tell it to.
The
worms are pretty easy to stop. Open Control Panel and uninstall
pieces of
Windows' spammer controls.... Email worms run under Visual Basic
Scripting, a little operating system Billy puts in Windoze so the
companies
can take control of your system without your permission. No VBS, No
control, no .vbs worms can run. We don't tell you about it, of
course,
because "we" want to control you. Billy calls it "Windows Scripting
Host"
under ol' Win98/95/ME but has further obscured the name in XP, I
think.
It's one of Windows' "accessories". While we're uninstalling the
crapware,
ActiveX and Javascript, two more "controls" webpages use to take
over your
system, can be uninstalled or disabled. Java, itself, has long been
hacked. Without access to YOUR controls, many webpages will simply
refuse
to give you access. Do you really need to give them control just to
look
at their content or shop at their online stores? I think NOT.

Once you've gotten rid of these 4 dangerous items, browsing becomes
safer.
I like Norton Anti Virus, with a paid-for subscription, to have some
really
smart hackers on my side of the fence. You don't need the firewall,
now
that you have a fully-functional ROUTER firewall protecting the
whole
machine. Antivirus protects you from downloading some nasties from
Usenet
or .exe/bat/com/etc. files someone you probably know who has an
infected
machine will send you without even knowing about it. Their
installed virus
uses THEIR Outlook Express address book with YOUR email address in
it to
propagate a virus email with their own headers. NAV protects from
thousands of these. (www.symantec.com) It's worth the price....

The spam/spyware has two free tools that work great. Ad Aware
Standard
edition will rid you of most of them. Spybot will scrape the other
crap
off your Windows Registry, the directory used to tell Windows what
it can
do. I don't recommend using Spybot, wholesale. Sometimes it cleans
so
well it cleans stuff Windows expects to find....your system won't
boot if
you're not very careful.

Get the router.....Zone Alarm is near worthless.... I like
Netgear's
routers over Linksys. I have both. Somewhere behind my desk,
hanging by
its wires, is a Netgear RP-114 router that has worked perfect since
I first
turned it on several years ago. I can probably find it if I crawl
around
back there. It used to be on my desk....????? I know it's working
because
it read your message...(c;

Drive safe on the net. Oh, Usenet. I like Xnews from
xnews.newsguy.com,
not because it's some wonderful system, but because it downloads
usenet
binaries in any format for months without crashing even Windoze.
I'm
typing on it, now....