Coming to you live from...

[Lexman]

A new cable modem on the 900 mhz PC! Whewwwhooo! It's smokin'!


Ok, it's half duplex in terms of cable modem in that my provider's network is brand new and only single directional for downloads only. It uses a conventional analog modem for uploads. Actually, I was like the 4th customer. Probably 2 of those worked at the company, who knows. So, there have been issues to work through there.


Anyway, my purposes of posting this is more to let people know that I am struggling with several issues at the moment technically speaking at home.


First, the new PC developed a problem, which I won't get into here except to say it involved clearing the CMOS, and a complete reconfiguration. Yuck! :E


Not only that, been dealing with cable modem issues, setup issues, AND at least 2 versions of a virus! :{ I know I have the CIH_95 virus, and probably the CIH_196 or some such. Geeze! I had that 95 one some time ago, and thought I had completely erardicated it. Never again will I run without virus protection. I am now trying to clean up the laptop which coincidentally was either corrupted by, or corrupted, my cable modem network manager's cable modem software. Turns out I don't even require the pissy software with my NT configuration. I simply connect through the direct IP with browser supported connectivity. Simply incredible!


With all the problems this week, I am rather much seperated from all the old. It must remain that way until I am sure I am virus free. Anyway, I will get things more to my liking this weekend. But I wanted to let the people know that I communicate with every day that there is a reason I am not around when I am not around.


As if this weren't enough, it's been hell week at work too, lol. I need a break. I am beginning to feel like that guy on the TV show that premiered tonight. Cursed!


Whew!


Lex

[Andrew Pratt]

are you running Norton Antivirus 2K now? Its a wonderful program for scanning emails and attachments. Its nailed a few virus in email attachments before they've even arrived on my PC...just cleaned the file and away I went

[ThomasW]

Hey Mr Speed demon!

Is that cable connection "on" fulltime? If so then take a long hard look at some of the "firewall" programs.

I have Norton Personal Firewall and it's quite effective. But unfortunately it's also effective at slowing down surfing. There a noticable difference with my old 563 Mhz overclocked Celeron, with the program running vs disabled.

My satellite link gives me the same situation as you, blazing downloads, but 56K uploads. Supposedly Hughes is working on satellite uploads to compete with full broadband, but who knows when that will be ready.

Sorry to hear about all the virus issues. Is a wipe to the metal and reinstall in order? Man those are a pain.

To avoid those I keep my HD's in those quick remove caddies. The main one running all the time. Then weekly I do a PowerQuest "Drive Copy" to a backup in a separate drive in the same PC. It's only plugged in for the back up. For further protection there's a third caddie on the shelf that has a pure basic setup, with all the software preinstalled.

With this technique if there is any drive failures, corruption, software program installations issues or viruses, there are two complete units available. So it's 30 seconds to plug one in and get the system up and running. This is THE benefit of cheap HD's, combined with the caddies

Anyway good luck, I certainly don't envy the task you have to do!




theAudioWorx
Klone-Audio

[John Holmes]

I am sorry to hear about your PC woes Good luck this weekend.




"I came here, to chew bubble gum and kickass. And I'm all out of bubble gum!!!" My DVD's

[Mats]

Lex, Install the freeware version of ZoneAlarm from ZoneLabs.
It works like a sharm and is easy to use!

Also a damn good little toy for keeping track of nasty Trojans is the Tauscan, found at http://www.agnitum.com/products/tauscan/
They also have a program named Jammer which is a small, yet efficient network analyzer. It was designed with novice users in mind and combines a user-friendly interface with a powerful engine designed to detect attempts to install two of the most dangerous Trojans namely Back Orifice or Netbus on your system.
These 2 are not free but they are worth the few bucks they cost!!!




Mats
HTGuide

[Lexman]

Hmmm, where have I been?

Anyway, yes Andrew, running Norton 2000, and I have to say, it's the best and easiest to use virus software I have used to date. Maybe I won't get tired of fussing with this one!

Thomas, I think a scratch install is in order on my laptop. But the good news is, the install was only a few weeks old due to other problems I had recently. I began getting a lot of blue screens on the laptop, and saved off my stuff to my jazz drive prior to re-loading it. That saved my butt, though the jazz drive was infected. I disinfected it, but the laptop's dos level boot is corrupted, and without another 95 machine, hard to make "disinfected" boot discs now. Can't find originals.

Anyway, looks like a scratch install is in order on the laptop, it's the easiest way now.

But the desktop is improving, though issues remain with peripherals and compatibility. Tonight is another night.

Thanks John, thing went good for the most part, but the laptop is toast, reload to come.

Mats, thanks for the tips on virus protection. Are you saying I am a novice?

Lex