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Raw Bytes Computer News KPBX FM 91.1 Radio National Public Radio Network Frank Delaney Producer Broadcast on Wednesday Morning 7:35 AM During Morning Edition Support Public Radio ! The Theater Of the Mind |
In computer news this week 04/15/2009 The safety of Microsoft security
updates – or – not fearing the conflicker worm and other things
that go bump in the night The WWW
has changed the world, and particularly the PC world. Before the Web, it was
a major hassle to update your operating system. You’d have to wait for
a new operating system update to come out on cd or disks to be sent to you,
and then you’d have to do a system backup, and then do the update and
hope everything worked ok. Today
through the WWW you can get all the updates for whatever Microsoft operating
system you’re running, XP or Vista, automatically. You click
on Control Panel, Security center, and just make sure that automatic updates
are on. You also want to make sure your firewall is on, and that you have
some kind of an antivirus program. Then when you reboot your computer, the
new security updates are installed and you’re safe again – at
least for awhile This
gives you the peace of mind of not having to worry about Media panic over the
conflicker worm or some other sky is falling press promoted disaster
that’s supposed to wipe out everybody. Even in
the old days, back before the WWW, most of the virus panics were fanned by
the press on slow news days, and by vendors selling anti-virus software. If
you remember the debacle of the Michaelangelo virus, which was supposed to
wipe out the world, the doom and gloom never happened, and it seems that the
cases of where the virus actually was supposed to have hit was in overseas countries
where there’s no way to verify anything. So I just
ignored the conflicker worm panic of a couple weeks ago, and of course
nothing happened. This year
Microsoft is supposed to offer free anti-virus and anti-spyware protection,
and I’m looking forward to it. It’s about time they did that,
after all these years. You have
to realize that if some computer virus or worm is going to affect a whole lot
of people, Microsoft is going to have some kind of free solution to prevent
it, and all you need to do is keep the automatic security updates for your
own computer turned on, and you’ll be ok. Then when
you watch news coverage of these events, you can laugh. You’ll see the
same talking heads who can’t predict the weather telling you how to
avoid a major computer disaster. How about just getting the sunny days right
for a change? You do
need to be using an anti-virus and anti-spyware program. I’m still
using the free version of AVG antivirus, which was just updated to a new
version 8.5. And I use Microsoft antispyware, and maybe a few other
utilities, but I’m not just worried about malware as much anymore. Of
course, I do keep my computer always backed up onto a Western Digital
Passport drive, and I have numerous other backups on flash drives and also
online. Remember
you can never back up too much, or have too many backup copies. But you
can worry too much, and having the Microsoft security updates turned on
should give you a lot of peace of mind, |
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For Raw Bytes This is Frank Delaney (C) 2009 MTA Micro
Technology Associates http://www.mtamicro.com/kpbx.html PO Box 31522 Spokane, Wa 99223-1522 (509)624-7230 |
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