Are you people for real? Your UPSET that it found things like VNC and WinPCap?
I've tested it on several machines at work, and it found spyware that Adaware and Spybot couldn't. It did also mark Dameware Mini Remote (a remote desktop program) as potential spyware, as well as the custom hosts file that I put on all machines. I think all these non-spyware programs were set to "Ignore" by default, but its not too hard to set to "Ignore All" if you know it should be there.
My point is, if you use VNC/Dameware/WinPCap/whatever... , you probably know it. But if you don't use them, and it's installed on your system, its probably a GOOD thing to have a scan pick it up and make you aware of it.
So far I'm impressed with this beta, and if the worst problem all you nay sayers can find is that it's too thorough, you should probably find something else to complain about. If this didn't have "Microsoft" in front of it, I bet I good deal of you would be hailing it as one of the best anti-spyware products out there.
I've worked in the IT department of a University Library for about three years now, so I've done some work on this myself. The problem with switching to Linux or even Mac is that 99% of your patrons coming in will be used to the windows world, and most of them will have no idea on how to use anything else. If you switched the stations to Linux, your librarians will be spending a significant part of their time just helping users to do basic computing tasks. I'm not saying that Linux is so complicated that people can't figure it out, but the majority of computer users get frustrated by change.
We use all Windows 2000 machines here and lock down the profiles through group policy. Add a good virus scanner (Trend Micro PC-Cillin 2004) and make sure automatic updates are set to download and install automatically, and you will have almost no problems. We also use a program called public browser (http://teamsoftware.bizland.com/) and disguise it as Internet Explorer and set it as the default browser to lock down the browser end of things. Public Browser also works well for our kiosk stations that just show our catalog.
If a machine does get hit (none of our new ones have) it doesn't take much to re-immage it. If we had the funds, I would deffinitely like to move to XP, mostly for the benifits included in SP2, but 2000 does fine for us.
The other thing we will be doing in the future is putting all our public machines behind a firewall/router for increased security.
Yeah, I definitely agree to this. We bought a Linksys router to do windows 2000 installs. Before that, a new machine would get hit within 5 minutes by some blaster variant. Now we can get the machine completely set up before we switch it over to the university network.
I agree. I'm a PC user at heart, 5th year college student in MIS. This summer I bought a 2 year old iBook...one of the first white ones. I use it to take notes in all my classes since its small and light and fits easily on a desk and in my backpack. Also, the wireless internet connectivity is a good distraction in class... did I mention I am a 5th year?
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Are you people for real? Your UPSET that it found things like VNC and WinPCap?
I've tested it on several machines at work, and it found spyware that Adaware and Spybot couldn't. It did also mark Dameware Mini Remote (a remote desktop program) as potential spyware, as well as the custom hosts file that I put on all machines. I think all these non-spyware programs were set to "Ignore" by default, but its not too hard to set to "Ignore All" if you know it should be there.
My point is, if you use VNC/Dameware/WinPCap/whatever... , you probably know it. But if you don't use them, and it's installed on your system, its probably a GOOD thing to have a scan pick it up and make you aware of it.
So far I'm impressed with this beta, and if the worst problem all you nay sayers can find is that it's too thorough, you should probably find something else to complain about. If this didn't have "Microsoft" in front of it, I bet I good deal of you would be hailing it as one of the best anti-spyware products out there.
[end of rant]
I've worked in the IT department of a University Library for about three years now, so I've done some work on this myself. The problem with switching to Linux or even Mac is that 99% of your patrons coming in will be used to the windows world, and most of them will have no idea on how to use anything else. If you switched the stations to Linux, your librarians will be spending a significant part of their time just helping users to do basic computing tasks. I'm not saying that Linux is so complicated that people can't figure it out, but the majority of computer users get frustrated by change.
We use all Windows 2000 machines here and lock down the profiles through group policy. Add a good virus scanner (Trend Micro PC-Cillin 2004) and make sure automatic updates are set to download and install automatically, and you will have almost no problems. We also use a program called public browser (http://teamsoftware.bizland.com/) and disguise it as Internet Explorer and set it as the default browser to lock down the browser end of things. Public Browser also works well for our kiosk stations that just show our catalog.
If a machine does get hit (none of our new ones have) it doesn't take much to re-immage it. If we had the funds, I would deffinitely like to move to XP, mostly for the benifits included in SP2, but 2000 does fine for us.
The other thing we will be doing in the future is putting all our public machines behind a firewall/router for increased security.
Yeah, I definitely agree to this. We bought a Linksys router to do windows 2000 installs. Before that, a new machine would get hit within 5 minutes by some blaster variant. Now we can get the machine completely set up before we switch it over to the university network.
I don't think it would even be possible to have an eclipse caused by such a (relatively) small object at that great a distance.
I agree. I'm a PC user at heart, 5th year college student in MIS. This summer I bought a 2 year old iBook...one of the first white ones. I use it to take notes in all my classes since its small and light and fits easily on a desk and in my backpack. Also, the wireless internet connectivity is a good distraction in class... did I mention I am a 5th year?