The INQUIRER guide to protecting your PC's butt

[Article brought back again because of that awful Mr MyDoom thing. See also this antiviral guide, here. Oh, and try a mailwasher like this this one to prevent the deluge of viruses, as well as spams. Ed.]

IF A USER is on Win98 or earlier, first we gotta make sure plug & play is disabled until you need it.

Here.

Then, the useless MS distributed COM function is kilt off with this

Disabling scripting (and turning it back on) is easy with this.

Used in conjunction with this registry lock down program, here.

This little proggy that preserves your start page + stops BHOs from getting installed on the fly, here.

Then you're pretty safe from those spooky boogie bugz when you're oot & aboot the wibbly wobbly ... and all freeware! ... here's another piece of freeware that is a total 'permissions based' application for Winderz flavors using the NTFS file system.

Here.

This won't let anything get installed unless you specifically tell it to; I believe by implementing the same functions as the other set of proggies.

So, until these get hacked (and if you have the first three running I don't know how they could) safety should be high

of course, if you're on WinXP, do ye' olde' Restore Point thing before loading these up (though they run with rock solid stability for moi). Personally, I use the one Symantec product worth a poop, Ghost for my back-ups. µ

See Also
INQUIRER guides to Everything