Tuesday, February 15, 2005
Windows hygiene actually works
I just read an interesting forum post by a guy who builds custom computers.
He puts them together just like I would recommend. He does the setup from behind a firewall so the machine is protected while he installs the security fixes. He installs all the security fixes, plus antivirus, plus a personal firewall program, and perhaps most important he makes sure that the usual login doesn't have dangerous Administrator-level privileges, so that if something does go wrong the damage will be limited.
He was complaining that after six months a "non-trivial number" of the machines he sells get infested with something or other. ("The glass is partly empty").
Why is that good news? Because he didn't say "most". The glass is mostly full. The flip side of what he's saying is that the majority of properly set up Windows machines are still alive after six months. Compare that to this column describing a four-minute survival time for a Windows PC which didn't have the same careful setup.
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He puts them together just like I would recommend. He does the setup from behind a firewall so the machine is protected while he installs the security fixes. He installs all the security fixes, plus antivirus, plus a personal firewall program, and perhaps most important he makes sure that the usual login doesn't have dangerous Administrator-level privileges, so that if something does go wrong the damage will be limited.
He was complaining that after six months a "non-trivial number" of the machines he sells get infested with something or other. ("The glass is partly empty").
Why is that good news? Because he didn't say "most". The glass is mostly full. The flip side of what he's saying is that the majority of properly set up Windows machines are still alive after six months. Compare that to this column describing a four-minute survival time for a Windows PC which didn't have the same careful setup.
# posted by Frederick @ 9:13 AM Email to a friend:
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