Mike Hord 20:20 2004-12-15: >trojan horse/remote control apps I would suggest to use a software firewall of that kind that also stops a= ny software on your machine that is trying to communicate unless you have= given permission. This hinders any virus that got into any of yours computers to spread, an= d also hinders trojans. *ANY* program communicating have to be granted a= ccess before it is let through. I use ZoneAlarm, but there are other. Be sure to shut dowm the half-bake= d firewall that comes with XP SP2 first... ZA and other products are muc= h more configurable to allow certain traffic and certain apps at your des= ire. Then there are Ad-Aware and other software than seek certain (lots) troja= n programs and such stuff. But they would normally be found by a applica= tion aware software firewall as described anyway. (ZoneAlarm once helped my restore customers computers computer one at a t= ime amongst infected computers, by blocking virus from spreading, *while*= other infected and uninfected computers was continously used ;) ) About virus scanners, i have tested some: Norton AV should be avoinded (c= lumsy resource hungry, tedious update. Best so far is Kaspersky: Efficie= nt, compact and frequint updates, configurable, and have won tests from r= eliable consumer institute R=E5d&R=F6n for example. Best is of course to avoid security hooles. Half of them on Windows is o= n MSIE. And as it is rooted deep down in the OS it can plant malware lik= e no other browser possibly can even if they were tailored too...=20 The natural choice is Firefox. Likewise change Outlook to Thunderbird for mail. (Or Opera for eithe ror both, can handle both browsing and mail securely.= Opera is a bit different and do no timport mail from Outlook as good as= Thunderbird, but it iis really competent. And use OpenOffice for office work. You do not need to uninstall anything to try theese. All thoose programs are available on Linux, Solaris and MAC too (some on = BeOS, OS/2 and other) , so it is convenint then to interoperate with - or= change to - any modern OS when you get more fed up with Windows. Free t= hey are too! (except Opera that is commercial, gratis if you accept almost unnotable a= ds) http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/ http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/ http://www.opera.com/ http://www.openoffice.org/ (I am myself in the OS move, using all above since a while... but still m= ainly an old Eudora for mail (secure too)...) You could also download/buy a Open Source Software for MSWindows CD: http://theopencd.org=20 http://gnuwin.epfl.ch/index.html http://pmw.myip.org/oss/ /Morgan -- Morgan Olsson, Kivik, Sweden _______________________________________________ http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist