Re: Any feelings on Windows Defender (sic!) beta 2?

"Mike Easter" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> Skiwi wrote:
>> Any feelings on Windows Defender (sic!) beta 2?
>
> Altho' windows defender isn't on the list of apps at
> spywareinfo, if you
> search for it in the forum discussions, nothing bad is being
> said about
> it.  I've seen some articles which were favorable to it.  At
> SWI, the
> advice is to disable it prior to running some programs like
> hijack this.

Actually, if you check the newsgroup MS set up for it, I think
there are some fairly telling problems with it that keep showing
up.  I say "I think" because in reality they are flooding
microsoft.public.security and ... .security.homeusers rathen than
using the right newsgroups.  I think part of the problem is the
expertise of the users, but other problems seem to be, well,
relevant.
   Remember, you wont' see many pros there, only cons; the people
wiht no problems don't post <g>.

>
>> Any advantage to installing it alongside Spybot, Teatimer,
>> Adaware and
>> Spywareblaster?

I use those too except for teatimer; Instead I use Winpatrol for
real time monitoring and the system control it provides me.
Pretty handy but a little obtrusive until you get it trained.  I
used to use Sygate's personal firewall but switched to ZoneAlarm
when Sygate stopped supporting the freebie version.  Turned out
ZA had surpassed it anyway, so ... IMO at least.

>
> How did you go about choosing your 'collection'?  Why not have
> more? or
> less?  Why those instead of others?  There are a lot of them.

In my case, mostly word of mouth and "test" installing them,
throwing out the ones I didn't get along with or that seemed to
be stagnant.  I used to apply them in different orders to see who
caught what, and kept a mental scorecard of which ones caught the
most hits and the least, moving the good ones to my "keep"
status.  Winpatrol is my favorite, I think, becuase of all the
other features it has.  It's overkill of you only want cookie
management, but it does make it convenient and gives a sensible
control over them.

>
> I don't use any.  Some people should use a really lot of them,
> I guess.

Interesting.  I only say this because I know you're experienced
enough to not panic about it, but I'll bet if you download and
run Adaware (lavasoft.com) or Sypbot Search & Destroy
(spybot.com, I think), that they will find about 25 "hits" for
varying degrees of imortance on your system.  Unless you surf to
a lot of new places often, in which case it might find a lot of
them.  You don't sound like the kind that will have much actual
malware, but I'll bet it finds a lot of trackers, maybe some info
senders if nothing else.
   IMO Adaware and Spybot are the two better ones, but there are
some newer ones out there that I've never tried that people speak
well of.  As always, ymmv on any of them, of course.

Cheers,

Pop


>
> -- 
> Mike Easter
> kibitzer, not SC admin
>