New Anti-virus

[anarchy420x]

I'm running AVG Free; I think it might be slacking. I'm looking for other Anti-viruses to try out. Also, looking for info on anything else I should scan my system with to make sure it's "secure".

[wan26]

Other things to try when securing windows could be; closing down services that you don't need like remote registry or remote desktop service etc, some of which listen on ports, applying a security template/gpo to your machine such as nist along with 'hardening' the local security policy.

For your connection; Change your routers password to something stronger, change the wpa authentication key regularly, disable wps if you can. Also adjust the routers firewall carefully to ignore probes, fragmented packets, and filter properly.

AVG free is ok for an anti-virus with a low memory footprint, and worked alright with EMET.

You could scan your system with MBSA to see if it's configured well too.

[anarchy420x]

Other things to try when securing windows could be; closing down services that you don't need like remote registry or remote desktop service etc, some of which listen on ports, applying a security template/gpo to your machine such as nist along with 'hardening' the local security policy.

For your connection; Change your routers password to something stronger, change the wpa authentication key regularly, disable wps if you can. Also adjust the routers firewall carefully to ignore probes, fragmented packets, and filter properly.

AVG free is ok for an anti-virus with a low memory footprint, and worked alright with EMET.

You could scan your system with MBSA to see if it's configured well too.

Thank you very much for your reply, but you threw quite a few acronyms out there that I have not idea what they are. I'll list them: NIST, GPO,EMET, MBSA. I'm sure I could Google a few of them to figure out what they are, but to avoid me getting confused, would you mind posting the long versions of the names for me to Google?

[wan26]

Yeah I put too many acronyms in there sorry yes,

MBSA microsoft baseline security analyzer
NIST http://csrc.nist.gov/itsec/
EMET Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit
GPO, group policy object editor is a snapin for the microsoft management consol

When I was hardening my machine, I over did it once and screwed things up but later made a backup then applied changes because some of the settings mess with usability

[anarchy420x]

Thank you very much; I'm going to have to do some research tomorrow. It's late here. I have a last question for you (that was probably a lie) Does the loads of security effect your computer performance a lot, or is it like the smoking conundrum? If that doesn't make sense, I'll explain. Thanks much in advance.

[wan26]

It's all good :)

I see configuring Windows as a balancing act between performance and security, as opposed to Linux which always works for me out of the box. Some settings and measures to increase security in Windows, like closing services etc can increase performance, with other things such as security templates I tried different configurations over time to see what the effect was, knowing I had a back up if I harmed my machine in some way. And in the end it worked out, and probably helped that I never used the machine for gaming.

All in all my general rule was, the less processes I had enjoying my RAM the better, as I never cared for all the fancy regalia that comes with the OS, I would even have just a classic desktop lol. Anyway, in my opinion it's worth it doing all this then scanning it with MBSA or even GFI Languard too.

Any unnecessary program or service, as well as listening ports, to me, are attack vectors.

[centip3de]

I'm running AVG Free; I think it might be slacking. I'm looking for other Anti-viruses to try out. Also, looking for info on anything else I should scan my system with to make sure it's "secure".

wan26 pretty much answered your entire question, but you should also check out SuperAntiVirusFree, always worked back when I used Windows.

[progTest1234]

a

[anarchy420x]

a

Did your program work?

[centip3de]

a

Did your program work?

It's not done yet, but it's close to it.