Microsoft has revealed that it has no plans to port the security fixes contained in WinXP SP2 to older versions of windows like Win98/ME and 2000. I suspect that the reason for this, is that Microsoft is increasingly finding that one of its worst competitors is it’s own previous versions of Windows and Office. What better way to convince people to pay $$$ to upgrade, then to tell them they are insecure if they don’t. My suspicion is that this might also result in a few more people considering giving Linux a try.
What does that mean for 30 percent of our visitors that are still using one of those operating systems? Well not too much really, you can get many of the same benefits by using free software available on the net, my suggestions are as follows:
1. Swap Internet Explorer for FireFox to remove the flaws introduced by IE.
2. Get a good anti virus app. AVG is fairly good and totally free.
3. Install a firewall. ZoneAlarm is free and very good.
4. Regularly remove spyware. Adaware and Spybot search and destroy are both good free programs for this.
5. If you use Outlook Express, or Outlook, you should consider changing to a email application that doesn’t rely on Internet Explorer libraries. ThunderBird Is a very good free alternative that has extras like Spam scanning.
6. I’m going to recommend you use Internet Explorer now, but only briefly, once every fortnight, make a point of using it to run “Windows Update” and download any new critical patches. (Open IE, then go to “Tools” in the menu, and select “Windows Update”.)
Follow all those steps, and set aside half an hour every week or two to update AVG, Adaware and SB S&D to the latest pattern files. (AVG is set by default to only look for updated pattern files automatically when the old one is 14 days old, and that’s far too long, change it to 2 days at the most.) and run a scan on your system with all three.
When it’s finished, it’s probably a good idea to restart the system and then run a disk defragment. (ok, so do it on a lunch hour once a fortnight.:-) )
regards
Franki
