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First Ten Programs on New Install?
reddigitaldragon asks: "Some people re-install once a year, but if you're anything like me your machine is formatted at least once a month. After the OS is in, then come the favorite/must have/most used programs to install. My first installations for Windows (I use it; get over it): Trillian, Winrar, Firefox, Winamp, SmartFTP, Azureus, NMap, GKrellM, PowerDVD. What are your First 10 installed programs?" What are the first 10 programs you would install on a Windows machine? How about for a Unix machine?
Maybe if AVG/Mcafee/FProt/Norton Antivirus was among those 10, you wouldn't need to reinstall every month?
Updated drivers followed by Antivirus and Mozilla is what goes on my Windoze boxen first.
Why the hell would anyone need to reinstall an entire OS every month? I mean - I know Windows is bad, but come on - its ridiculous.
I have 4 computers that I work on and all of them have not been formatted since I first purchased them. Am I strange or something. I'm using Linux, Win2K and Mac OSX on the various machines. Am I odd?
Well, I decided to reformat my PowerBook's drive just for the experience. It wasn't at all necessary, as it is with Windows after a few months of use.
Heres my list of programs installed since the reformat a month ago:
LaunchBar
Yep, thats the beauty of the Mac: a rock solid system that doesn't necessetate reformating, and a good suite of software preloaded.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
Black Ice is a ridiculous product with many security issues of its own. Do your own Googling.
The best of the worst in software firewalls IMHO is Norton Internet Security. Good support, and if it hoses your TCP/IP stack (like most any software-based firewall has a tendency to do over time...), there's at least well documented support.
If they're a dialup user, security patch the hell out of the box and be done with it. If they're broadband, figure out a way to put a hardware solution in there. Don't compromise the stability of the TCP/IP stack with software filtering. I don't know how many machines I've had to rebuild the stacks on because of shitty software-based firewalls for Windows.
And, as always, YMMV.
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I haven't read all the comments so this might be redundant but, are all y'all nuts? Reinstalling the OS once a month or even once a year? Holy shit! My current box is 4 years old and I've never reinstalled the OS and hope I never have to.
"Who in their right mind (excluding users) would think of installing software without installing ALL the patches for the OS they are using..."
Not sure, maybe the same person who ends up having to format and reinstall his OS at least once a month? (Not saying poster was in his right mind...)
Seriously though, a note to reddigitaldragon:
If you know you're gonna reinstall and you know what you're gonna put on the system after installing, you really should invest in a copy of Ghost (or DriveImage, but I haven't worked with that, so I can't personally vouch for its functionality). It'll save you several hours each month. Do your install once, install your progs, defrag (for good measure) make a Ghost image, burn it to CD along with ghost.exe and next time the whole process will take you ~10 minutes.
Information doesn't want to be anthropomorphized anymore.
Why don't you just circumvent the activation? A bit of google searching should take care of getting the details. It's not difficult to do, and you're already pirating it anyway. You might as well avoid having to reinstall every 30 days.
Why are you relying on antivirus products to stop the worm?
Why don't you enable the built in firewall before putting the machine online?
If you don't like that, download a copy of zonealarm, stick it on removable media and install it before putting the machine online.
No, you don't see at all. Have you ever tried to bzip a raw 40GB NTFS partition with 1GB of data on it? You will get a file that's a good deal larger than 1GB. This is because bz2 doesn't understand NTFS well enough to know which are the empty blocks so it treats all of it as data.
I really don't want my image program to understand the filesystem. What happens if in a future version they decide not to support a certian filesystem, or if I switch operating systems and there's no unimager for my new operating system? Even if it is a bit of a waste of space, I'd rather just have the image program take a snapshot of the raw disk image, completyly agnostic to the filesystem. Then I can restore it however I want because there has been no interpretation of the data, it's just plan old raw data.