Filed under: Registry Cleaners
Do you think the following is a great combination for a secure PC?
April 22, 2011
2 thoughts on “Do you think the following is a great combination for a secure PC?”
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Clean Registry and Optimize PC
I wrote my vision on computersecurity here:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AvhG904XX5DjwC6xaN2jknvty6IX;_ylv=3?qid=20110410000246AAGiS8V
(it’s the longest answer)
Personally im a big fan of boot-it ng but lately i’ve had little time for messing with computers and a new version called bootit bm (bootit bare metal) has been released that i think (although i don’t have it yet) might potentially be the greatest utility ever if it works wel.
Bootit bare metal now supports esata external hdd’s according to the specifications so for a truly secure system i’d advice bootit bm plus an external esata hdd to store your systemimages on. I’m not not sure if bootit bm wil support an external hardware mirrored raid hdd, but that would of course be the best possible way to store your system backups:
http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/bootit-bare-metal.htm
Another utility i used in the past but that i find hard to judge is regrun from graetis. It’s a very messy utility, with horribly bad documentation (bad english) but it does have tons of features and might be a good low resource extra security layer, also containing a spyware database. This utility is certainly worth checking out. Some interesting features of regrun are a registry compactor (removes the gaps in the registry left by deleted entries by for instance registry cleaners) and the capability to protect user-defined files against change. The utility also uses a bait file (bait.exe) to catch virusses without needing signature scanning (the utility just checks the bait file for changes, because a change would indicate a virus). To be short:although a bit messy regrun is a potentially very usable utility that can be configured in such a way that it hardly uses any resources after booting. It’s also designed to work together with realtime antivirus software (it even has an anti-virus coordinator) so can be used together with a realtime antivirus utility.
One of the most important utilities you can have for protection against data-theft and computer hyjacking is a good firewall. Realy focussing on antivirus and other signature based security scanners is missing the nail with the hammer, the most essential are good systembackups and a good selfprotected and internet accessing files protecting firewall. Signature scanning has it’s uses though, in my eyes mainly in an on-demand role, to preventively find malicious software or to maybe repair infected software. Note (see regrun) that there are signature independant measures possible against virusses that don’t use that many resources as realtime antivirus. If you have a fast computer though and you don’t need optimum performance there is nothing against using realtime antivirus though, except maybe for a higher risk of software conflicts and crashes.
"Do you think the following is a great combination for a secure PC?" It’s a good starting point. A firewall is probably as important, if not more important, than an AV and there’s many better than the default Windows firewall. The better ones wil have some form of Intrusion Prevention and will also protect you both inboud and outbound, unlike Windows f/w or the f/w on a router.
There are some very simple ways you could help protect your PC more. One of the main access points for malware are vulnerabilities in software such as Flash (new version due tomorrow), Adobe Reader, Java – anything that is very widely used is a big target.
Secunia PS is free, simple to use and will notify you of out-of-date software.
WOT (free) will warn you of known bad websites (although maybe Avast Pro does this?)
NoScript for Firefox (both free) will keep you pretty safe against XSS attacks on malicious / hacked webpages.
http://secunia.com/vulnerability_scanning/personal/
http://www.mywot.com/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/noscript/