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Scotty the watchdog would have caught that

http://www.winpatrol.com/

...I take it there's nothing analogous to WinPatrol for OS X?

I just click on the little Scotty dog in my tray and tell it to disable Google Updater at startup. And he says, "Startup disabled. By the way, this program is currently running. Should I kill it?" And I say, "Yeah, cool. Thanks, Scotty dog."

meanwhile they have 800,000 apps that all launch at boot and run in the system tray.

Scotty the watchdog can help you disable these. Also, a very nice and useful lightweight program.
http://www.winpatrol.com/

I was glad to see Winpatrol there - been using it for a few years now and it's a nice little app that centralises management of startup programs and services, keeps an eye on these things (as well as others, like your hosts file) for you and notifies when they change, and has some other handy features. None of it's rocket science, but it's all been nicely put together and works well. No, it's not open source, and I know any competent Windows user should be able to manage these things themselves, but it's a handy utility that makes an otherwise fiddly set of processes extremely straightforward.

[sarcasm] Oh, yeah, right it's ALL the user's fault. And *nix allows remote users to make changes to your system without your knowledge or permission whenever you're online too. And let's not forget that ton of Unix viruses that have made the internet nearly impossible to use because all the servers keep failing. And of course, *nix also requires a whole bunch of third-party software to secure it as well. Oh, and all OSes have browsers with Active X![/sarcasm]

Yes, a lot of users are stupid. But if the vulnerabilities weren't there in the first place there would be far fewer problems. If Windows was as secure as OS X -- and sorry, Apple fans, it's not as secure as some other *nix distros -- a virus would be a rare thing simply because it wouldn't have anything to work with. So, yeah, if they fixed it that would eliminate most viruses right there. Despite the stereotypes many would have you believe, there are a lot of Mac users who are just as clueless as the Windows user you're describing, but their systems haven't been compromised because the OS they're using isn't horribly insecure to begin with.

How to secure Windows by yours truly (hope this makes sense; I haven't had much coffee yet):
1. Firewall! Better still firewall + hardware router.
2. Anti-virus. I recommend Avast! for 2k and XP, AVG for 9x. If you want to pay for anti-virus, I've heard NOD32 is the best, with Kaspersky's coming in a close second.
3. Win Patrol prevents many changes fromt aking place without your permission; just scroll down the page for the link to download the free version.
4. If you're using Xp, get xpy which can disable a whole lot of Windows problems, such as the remote regsitry severice which allows remote users to change your registry whenever you're online -- yes, MS made it that on purpose and isn't going to fix it -- and Active X, Windows' most infamous security hole. You need to know what you're doing with this program though; if you don't, get someone who does to help you.
5. Be careful. Research *everything* you'd like to install. Check the program's ratings at download sites and do a search on the program's name with a good search engine.

Personally, though, I tend to think Winsdows is hopeless. Patches aren't enough, the system needs to be built from the ground up with much higher security. That means a lot of programs wouldn't even work after that. And would MS provide this as a free fix to all of their customers? Ha!

But speculation is useless. Microsoft is never going to try to really fix Windows; as successful as they've been already, why should they? Especially not when they can make money selling services to protect Windows! Never mind that they should've built a secure OS in the first place like practically everyone else did.

Would you trade a market of 95% of all Windows-users for even 50%? And how long do you think it'll take before Vista hits 50%? We (nerds) know that Vista isn't really that much of an improvement over XP now and the average user doesn't, but they will as soon as people they know get it -- and are likely disappointed unless they're upgrading from 98.

Let's rehash Vista for a moment:
1. Aero: You can make XP look just like Aero right now for free; just go look at softpedia.com or download.com.
2. The sidebar (is that even still on Vista?): desktop sidebar works even on Win 2k. And then's there the Google Desktop.
3. Better security: You'd be better off sticking with Win 2k or XP and getting the free version of Win Patrol. More security and it uses less than 5 mb of Ram to run in the background -- how much memory is Vista going to require again?
4. DirectX 10: It'll be almost useless for a long time. No game company is going to trade the market of almost all Windows-users for the Vista-users market exclusively. I predict that when games get more advanced they will either use OpenGL or even program what the game needs into the game itself (which likely won't be a permanent upgrade to your system).

Those are its pluses! Consider the biggest negative of all: 8 different versions, each costing more than the last. Is everyone going to rush out and buy a copy of Vista when the version they can afford has less features than the copy of XP they already have? Most who do so would by mistake.... and they won't be very quiet about how they feel they got screwed either. Personally, I think the 8 versions thing is what is going to be the biggest detriment to selling it. MS is trying to force everyone to pay through the nose for Windows and a great many simply will not. MS has forgotten that their target market is cheap; if they weren't a lot more of them would be using Macs (and I'm no Apple fangirl by any means, so don't take it that way).

Pirate Vista? A lot of them won't even bother with that when they find out from folks who have it that it's not really that much of an improvement over XP (from a user's standpoint) and requires powerful, expensive hardware -- which a lot of people simply don't have even now. You can't download hardware over p2p so Vista will be useless to many, who aren't going to upgrade without a compelling reason to do so. And what complelling reason will there be? MS's own games? That's not good enough for most, not so long as there are a lot of games that still support XP. No, I think Microsoft's only real hope lies with companies like Dell, who will sell pre-built computers with Vista. And guess how happy those people are going to be when they find out that they have to pay do much exta for features? To summarize, I think word of mouth alone will do a lot to prevent Vista's widespread adoption -- it will cost too much to have anything beyond the basics, most hardware can't even utilize it and hardware that can won't be all that common for another couple of years. For all that inconvenience Vista Premium should have a boatload of great features, but it's apparently not going to. Even with all that aside it would be very foolish for a game company to go Vista-only because the Vista market share is going to be too small. And if Vista bombs they certainly won't. Even if it is suceesful, its market share is still going to be low enough compared to previous versions of Windows that marketing games to it exclusively just wouldn't be profitable enough, especially since OpenGL can be used instead.

Come to think of it, maybe Vista will do more to push OpenGL than anything else. Bonus! Go MS! :-D

First of all, I recommend Avast! If they're running Win 98 or (heaven help them) Me, Avast! won't work so I recommend AVG. But I also recommend Win Patrol; it blocks a hell of a lot of spyware as well as most of the kind of malware (trojans, etc) that can download themselves into your system just while you're online.

"Lol, yeah you're parents should totally use Linux."

Indeed, they should try Xandros. I've tested several of the easy-to-use distros and I think it's the easiest and most user-friendly. And as I said quite recently, explaining the difference between root and a regular user account and pointing them to the Xandros is much easier than trying to teach novice Windows-users about computer security. When will people learn that Windows is not really easier to use but simply presents the illusion of being easier to use? It should be pretty obvious that it's just an illusion as soon as system is infected with malware to the hilt because the novice user simply installed whatever came with their computer, ususally McAffee or Norton's (both of which suck like black holes, in my experience). Most novice users don't even realize that anti-virus won't protect against spyware and vice versa. Take my word for it, fixing problems like that is my job.

I agree. I recommended AVG for years to my customers, but decided to give Avast! a try on a customer's infected PC after AVG. Avast! found a virus AVG didn't and uses 15%-20% less memory.

But I also recommend winpatrol. Not an AV program, it blocks out most malware, including some of the nastier stuff that can stealth-download itself into a Windows computer as long as the user is online. It only uses about 4 mb of memory to run in the background -- but I have no idea how much an enterprise solution would cost, as the regular version is free to home users. WinPatrol Plus costs $29.95 normally, so if there is no enterprise version, I guess it would depend on how many computers you need to isntall it on.

On the other, Sony is being made a scapegoat for the relative complexity of maintaining a secure and clean system.

You're right that computers are poorly designed when it comes to maintainability, but Sony deserve all the bad karma they are getting. They have a long history of abusing the trust of their customers, including installing spyware as standard on their Vaio computers. http://www.winpatrol.com/db/freesample/tgcmd.html

That's ok, if each user has their own desktop. They can trash out their own area, without trashing their neighbor's home directory or crashing the machine.

If you have a good amount of memory, you can have 4 or 5 users logged in at once, using remote terminals (like the computer in the bedroom, for example).

One of the best uses that I've found for Linux, is that when a Linux machine is used as the firewall and access point, very few bugs get through to the Windows machines.

Of course, you still need the anti-virus and spyware programs running, but there are far fewer break-ins because the Windows machines have become invisible to the Internet, and tougher to scan.

In addition, I also run WinPatrol on the Windows machines http://www.winpatrol.com/ which lets you know when anything at all is attempting an install, so you can say goodbye to those nasty little bugs that come from IM or the porn sites.

Michael

http://www.winpatrol.com/

enjoy.

Winpatrol.

Disables IE Plugins and some other good features as well.

Also, WinPatrol with Scotty the Windows Watch Dog. Woof!

WinPatrol does this as well, along with protecting/watching many other aspects of the system for potentially unwanted changes.

I've recently become a fan of WinPatrol. It's shareware, but will do pretty much all you need indefinitely in its trial version.

Most spyware tend to set themselves to run automatically on startup, and WinPatrol's watchdog will bark at you whenever a program does that, and let you confirm or deny. (If you register, they'll give you information about tat program to help your decision).