Get Fire Fox

[swifty]

Well, you guys are making a convincing argument.  I've been using Netscape since 1994, and it's hard for an old dog to learn new tricks.

Question:  Spyware and adware gets into your machine, other than not going to sites that do that, does firefox address spyware or adware crap?  I see it's made by Mozzila, and those people made Netscape.  AOL owns netscape now, so maybe FireFox is made by the old Mozilla
people who created Netscape?  I had to uninstall windows SP2 because it caused a lot of of problems.  One being my printer wouldn't work even after re-installing the drivers, and my damn fonts, on any application, is too light.  It's like a draft copy of something I printed, and it sucks, hard to read.  The uninstall fixed my printer issue, but not the font.  It also looks SP2 has a decent firewall, but again, this is microsoft.  I quess that's more than 1 question.  Sorry.     Oh wnat free firewall to you recommend?

TIA

[sordomudo]

For a firewall, ZoneAlarm has a great free version, which is a good segue into the adware topic.  A firewall is great for certain things like adware and worms b/c it will prompt you for permission to allow access both out of and into your system for programs it doesn't have on its trusted list.  So, even if you do get some weird peice of adware and it's trying to make HTTP requests from your machine, ZoneAlarm will prompt you first and you can decline, choosing to make that decision permanent and not be prompted in the future.

Firefox has built-in pop up blocking, which is a nice feature.  If you're having issues w/ it, though, you can disable it within Tools-->Options.  The Mozilla core was the engine that ran Netscape and when Netscape was purchased AOL, the code came along for the ride.  A few years ago, AOL spun Mozilla off and now it runs purely open source, relying on grass roots and donations.

SP2 is notorious for causing such whacky issues.  If you search on your printer's site for known problems w/ SP2, you might find something.  You also could try doing a system restore to the point before you installed SP2 if that's possible for you. 

Hope this helped.  Did it get most of your questions answered?

[swifty]

Yep, you sure did. Thanks! I cant do the restore 1) I am too lazy to find out how, 2)
I have too much data I need before the install, 3) I had an excellent piece of software that came with my HP CD Burner that allowed for a quck and easy complete backup of everything.  Time consuming yes, nut got it all on 6 discs.  Problem:  The restore had read errors, constant CRC etc., and I lost it all the very first time I backed up.

I don't like just backing up data files, I would like to reformat my drive when things get real bad, and start over  with my last backup.  I was backing up every week on the HP software, and I finally felt safe.  But Alas, It didn't work out. 

Any advice on complete HD backup to CD?  I am only using about 15 GB.

Dambn font issue still haunts me 

[sordomudo]

Hey, glad to be of some help.  I have some automated backups that run in the middle of the night and go to an external 160 GB usB 2.0 (or Firewire) drive so that I'm always safe.  All my data and documents are stored on a separate hard drive partition from my OS, which makes that a little easier in the event of some problems. 

The solution to backing up the whole hard drive, or in my case the 0S partition, is to have an "image" created every so often.  An image, if you're not familiar with the term, is a single file that is an exact replica of the state of a drive. So, using a restore utility, when something goes wrong, restoring the image will put a drive back to its identical state whenever the image was created.  The best program for this is probably Norton Gost 9.0, which comes with a great restore program as well as the ability to access individual files from within an image file. You probably wouldn't be able to fit an image of a large drive on a CD (750 MB) or even a DVD (4.7 GB), though.  Once Blue-ray DVDs come out, that might be possible.  I'd recommend for both document and image purposes getting an external drive like mine.  They're relatively cheap and oh so convenient.  I sleep easier knowing I'm backed up. For the record, I don't do an image backup b/c I'm tired of shelling out $$$ and Norton Ghost is about $70.  I figure if my HD tanks, I'll take the time every now and again to do a fresh install, which would probably be a good thing since Windoze gets kind of messy after awhile anyway.

Hope that helps, too!

[swifty]

Excellent advice.  Thanks.  I've been meaning to get an external HD to xfer stuff from My desktop to laptop, vice versa.  Then I got wireless netwrking going, but that was too slow, and ended up returning the hardware. 

Do you know of any decent software that will easily just do a complete but simple process of saving to disk?  Just like my HP software was supposed to do.  I liked the ease, and the complete backup, and then just run an update backup every week.  The only problem is that my lap top can't use that HP software, nor would I want to since I got all those CRC errors upon restore.

I am aware of the image backup, I was informed my web server used that, and I wasn't too comfortable with it since I had 200 megs of programming files on it!

[sordomudo]

I'm assuming you're looking for a simple, traditional backup program that will backup individual files and or folders programatically.  I use Argentum Backup which has a freeware version that allows you to back up to a single hard drive.  So, I just have a few different "jobs" that it does on different nights of the week so that in a week's time, all of my data is backed up.  I also have it backup my email and RSS feeds nightly b/c that's the most important and often-changing data I have.

So, Argentum is free, and there are many excellent packages out there you would pay for.  PC Magazine did a review of many of them in September: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1639634,00.asp

Let me know if that answered your questions!

[lookwhois]

I use Opera, no problems and super fast!