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20050104 Tuesday January 04, 2005

 Home PCs

So tedious!

Yes, being the IT chap in the family it was my onerous duty to help unpack and setup the various family membership who Santa blessed with a PC over the Christmas season.

With the promises of online shopping and banking, keeping in contact with friends and family, research family trees, playing online games it sounded like great fun.

Not wishing to put a damper on proceedings by harping on about phishing, worms, virii (not viruses!) DOS attacks, zombies and so on, I kept quiet but did setup their machines in a way to reduce 'tech support calls' as much as possible.

Naturally I could have done the whole JDS thing, but you can't do anything in one go!

Here then is my home PC guidelines for Windows users...

Boot up.
Download the free version of zonealarm firewall www.zonelabs.com immediately. I didn't fancy relying on the XP SP2 Firewall personally.
Do the windows update thing if you have ADSL. If not, tough. (Blog entry on this coming up!)
Download the free version of AVG (anti-virus) www.grisoft.com
Download Firefox (Browser) www.mozilla.com
Download Thunderbird (Email) www.mozilla.com
Download Mailwasher (anti-spam tool)
Download Media Player Classic www.free-codecs.com and use it instead of mediaplayer/realplayer/quicktime! Hurrah!
Download Flash and Java www.macromedia.com java.sun.com
Download free version of XPLite www.litepc.com and then uninstall everything possible, including IE! Hurrah!
Install Openoffice rather than the outmoded 'Works' software that often comes bundled.
www.openoffice.org
Switch off admin priviledges for the family member in question.

Result, a clean, friendly, secure and stable system and hardly any family tech support calls! Hurrah, hurrah, hurrah!!!

( Jan 04 2005, 01:22:37 PM GMT / Jan 04 2005, 12:26:32 PM GMT ) Permalink Comments [5]
Trackback: http://blogs.sun.com/Drew/entry/home_pcs

 You don't need your Passport anymore!

Well I don't think many of us were that surprised by the news that Microsoft has retired its Passport partner program following the recent news that EBay has decided to go its own route on sign on to its services.

I think any organisation would rather keep control of its own user population and be directly responsible for their authentication and security in some fashion, rather than giving control away to a 'gatekeeper' of some sort, regardless of who it might be.

A notable moment for the Liberty Alliance though, and a ratification that open standards once again prove to be the best way forward for all. IBM has joined Liberty recenty, will we shortly see Redmond signing paper too? Lets hope so, they could add quite a bit of expertise!

( Jan 04 2005, 12:24:36 PM GMT / Jan 04 2005, 12:19:58 PM GMT ) Permalink Comments [0]
Trackback: http://blogs.sun.com/Drew/entry/you_don_t_need_your


Yep, me.
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