Beating the PC blues
Well I don’t know what caused to problem in the first place, but the ‘puter is back online. These days loading up WinXP on to a cleanly formatted hard drive is just the very beginning of the process and was the easy part. The next step is locking down the system from external nasties, before I connect to the net.
This is really important, since the out of the box WinXP installation is full of well exploited security exploits. The Internet Storm Center tracks the average time before an unpatched system is exploited by the white noise of port scanning and exploit hunting viruses. It is currently tracking at about 23 minutes.
Unfortunately it takes longer than 23 minutes to download the required security patches to protect the system. So my first step was to load up antivirus and firewall software. My product of choice at the moment is Symantec Internet Security 200x. There are arguments against using this, like “virus writers create viruses specifically to defeat Symantec software”, and “there are better apps available for free”, but so far this is what I have at hand and it has performed well for me so far.
Ironically is was the loading of this software that killed my system in the first place, but this time around it loaded up without a hitch. Of course now i have a completely out of date antivirus program, but you have to start somewhere.
Time to get online. I was a bit worried that this would be a problem since I have a wireless network at home, and getting the proper drivers etc might have required a download. I used the old Netgear software that can with the network card in the first place. I was actually surprised that it all worked so easily (even after a bit of stuffing around with network security keys, etc.).
Knowing that I now had to act fast my first stop was to ‘Windows Update’ for the first of many downloads and installs. All I can say is thank god for Broadband. Without it I there is simply no way that these downloads would be feasible. Although the process is not difficult it takes a long time. Each wave of downloads are 10’s of MB in size. With the broadband link I was also able to start updating the Symantec software in parallel.
After multiple downloads and re-boots, and in excess of 150MB of downloads (i lost track after a while) the basic operating system and security software was completely up to date. In total this took over 4 hours. Quite frankly this is absurd, and highlights the reason why the average PC user has no chance to really protect themselves properly even if they are trying to take all possible precautions.
Probably a bit belatedly I then loaded up the remaining hardware drivers for the PC, i.e. motherboard chipset, Video drivers, Sound drivers and USB. Probably should have done these first. No matter.
I guess the next action demonstrates my order of priorities…
* download Firebox for browsing
* downloaded iTunes and iPodder to get the podcast stream back online.
This has turned into a big hassle (not a problem though) as I try to get iTunes to recognise all of the previously downloaded podcasts, and to get iPodder re-subscriber to all my previous podcast feeds.
That is where I am at today. The iPod is at home getting nearly 3GB of music and podcasts re-loaded into its little shiny case.
More geeky updates to follow
