[S-99]

Now, that's the thing i was also pointing out. You wont experience as much down time or problems with a standard user account. But, this is toward the different end of the spectrum because properly password protecting stuff and running as a standard user will keep the malicious **** out, and if not that, malicious **** won't even get a chance to load (unless you made it load on purpose).

In vista i just turned on the firewall, password protected the accounts, and just ran through the forest with no virus protection (the only reason for antivirus in this case would be for cleaning out the files with dormant viruses).

In your case with software failure and hardware failure. I can totally understand that being affected by the hardware problems more often. There's so many brands out there. The one i find to be trustworthy is msi. But, i've had great runs with biostar/bioware? And gigabyte is pretty awesome.

As far as software problems go, the big reason why a lot of people still run xp for stability as opposed to vista/7 (but for the most part i found vista to be pretty stable with sp1 when i had it). And the big reason why i don't run ubuntu (which is a gigantic snapshot of debian unstable), and the big reason i run mepis (based off of debian stable with sufficient backports if i do need a new version of something). Bleeding edge software will leave a bad taste in your mouth (as all of the ubuntu releases ever come about do except for lts's).

You take hard drive images regularly. Cool, you're pretty prepared. That's something i need to do, but mepis doesn't like remastersys.

[McCall]

If you want your laptop to run fast offline Jeff, one thing I found was to shut down stuff you don't need at the time. 'Cos my XP laptop for killing time on the train is an old 512MB hand-me-down, I put together a couple batch files for that. Gets it down to about 120MB memory utilisation, leaving the rest for whatever I want to do.

I guess with a bit of service tweaking you could do the same thing for any NT-based OS.


Speed up:

net stop "avast! antivirus"
net stop "System Event Notification"
net stop "COM+ Event System"
net stop "Windows Firewall/Internet Connection Sharing (ICS)"
net stop "Network Connections"
net stop "avast! iAVS4 Control Service"
net stop "Computer Browser"
net stop "Cryptographic Services"
net stop "DHCP Client"
net stop "Distributed Link Tracking Client"
net stop "DNS Client"
net stop "Error Reporting Service"
net stop "Event Log"
net stop "Help and Support"
net stop "IPSEC Services"
net stop "Print Spooler"
net stop "TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper"
net stop "Windows Defender"
net stop "Application Layer Gateway Service"
net stop "AST Service"
net stop "Automatic Updates"
net stop "Belkin High-Speed Mode Wireless G USB Driver"
net stop "DCOM Server Process Launcher"
net stop "Fast User Switching Compatibility"
net stop "HID Input Service"
net stop "Network Location Awareness (NLA)"
net stop "Protected Storage"
net stop "Secondary Logon"
net stop "Security Center"
net stop "Server"
net stop "SSDP Discovery Service"
net stop "System Restore Service"
net stop "Task Scheduler"
net stop "Terminal Services"
net stop "WebClient"


Go back online:

net start "avast! antivirus"
net start "avast! iAVS4 Control Service"
net start "Computer Browser"
net start "Cryptographic Services"
net start "DHCP Client"
net start "Distributed Link Tracking Client"
net start "DNS Client"
net start "Help and Support"
net start "IPSEC Services"
net start "Print Spooler"
net start "TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper"
net start "Application Layer Gateway Service"
net start "AST Service"
net start "Automatic Updates"
net start "Belkin High-Speed Mode Wireless G USB Driver"
net start "COM+ Event System"
net start "DCOM Server Process Launcher"
net start "Fast User Switching Compatibility"
net start "HID Input Service"
net start "Network Connections"
net start "Network Location Awareness (NLA)"
net start "Protected Storage"
net start "Secondary Logon"
net start "Security Center"
net start "Server"
net start "SSDP Discovery Service"
net start "System Event Notification"
net start "System Restore Service"
net start "Task Scheduler"
net start "Terminal Services"
net start "WebClient"
net start "Windows Firewall/Internet Connection Sharing (ICS)"

Not recommended.  Recent exploits in Flash have proven that it is not actually necessary to do anything more than browse the web to pick up malware, even with a good firewall and sticking to reputable websites.  Anyone running a Windows OS connected to the internet should have an AV package - I recommend Avast or MSE - and a decent router with NAT (and preferably SPI) enabled.

Well yeah, but in my personal scenario

That's what I do on my netbook.

The main issues are that
- I want to maximize the time I can go with battery alone
- I don't want any extra programs doing their weird **** in the background, hogging all my Atom power
- I'd really prefer not having to carry a decent router plus a generator/battery for it when I'm on the move. Which is most of the time, when speaking of my netbook usage.

The "desktop" (well ok, a laptop, but the one I never move and that has some processing power) is an entirely different matter and I happily run avast! on it.

Also, an antivirus is yet another program. Programs can have bugs, security holes and whatnot. And since antivirus software counts as a program, it can also have those. We saw a highly invigorating demonstration last spring, where an antivirus *cough*f-secure*cough* was put to test. A file was created. It was constructed so that the scanner would encounter an error while scanning it. After that file (in terms of scanning order), there was an actual malware program. The antivirus was set to scan the files. It scanned the erroneous file and encountered an error. Did the antivirus crash? No. Did it report that there was an error? No. That would be bad business. Who wants an antivirus that encounters errors while scanning. The scanner simply kept quiet and continued its business. As an interesting side effect of the erroneous file, the scanner completely failed to discover that there was an actual malware right after that. So yeah.

don't use anything made by symantec.  there are free, faster, better alternatives for every single one of their programs.  back when i was in the dorms and people would come to me cause their laptops were slow, no.1 solution is to remove whatever norton bull**** came installed and replace it with antivir or avast and spybot search and destroy.

Replacing the words "symantec" and "norton" with "F-Secure" would produce an equally accurate and true post.