Windows Security and On-line Training Courses?

eggegick writes "My wife has taken a number of college courses over the last three years and many of the classes used on-line materials rather than books. The problem was these required IE along with Java, Active X and/or various plug-ins (the names of which escapes me), and occasionally I'd have to tweak our firewall to allow these apps to run. I don't think any of these training apps would work with Firefox. All of this made me cringe from a security point of view. Myself, I use Firefox, No-Script, our external firewall and common sense when using the web. I have a very old Windows 2000 machine that I keep up to date. To my knowledge, I've never had a virus or malware problem. Her computer is a relatively new XP machine, and at this point she feels her computer has something wrong. But now she prefers to use my old machine instead of hers since it seems to be more responsive. We plan to run the recovery disk on hers. Assuming the college course work applications were part of the cause, what recommendations do any of you have for running this kind of software? Is there a VMware solution that would work — that is, have a Windows image that is used temporarily for the course work and then discarded at the end of the semester (and how do you create such an image, and what does it cost?)."

Comments

Windows security tips...

[girlintraining]

First, windows is bad blah blah, viruses blah blah, linux and baby jesus save blah blah. Okay, now that we've eliminated 95% of the discussion ideas for this thread: user training is a freaking awesome idea! Seriously, how many of you have walked into jobs and been handed a strip of paper with your userid and password (set to 'password') and told to change it -- and that was the total extent of your training?

Re:vmware is free

[DesertBlade]

VMWARE server SUX, the new web interface is horrible, I thought VMWARE was the best (may still be for enterprise) but I use VirtualBox in Ubuntu and love it. Think it is better for on the desktop use.

No matter how careful and no scripts you can still get infected quite easily. How long does it take an uprotected windows PC to get infected once it's plugged in?