Best way to protect your system

[lassiter]

Originally posted by seb
i use
Zonealarm for firewall

Adware and Spybot for spyware

and Norton for viruses

Ditto to all four. It's a jungle out there, but that combination will handle 98% of all threats, as long as you keep their data files updated and scan regularly.

Or buy a Mac. Yeah, I know. But I'm also a gamer, darnit.

And Cleo, tell your friend that it's an easy toggle setting to keep ZoneAlarm from popping up. Almost all the popups are alerting one to probes that are in fact being blocked by ZA, so there's really no need to be alerted. One can inspect the activity log at any time without having to be interrupted by ZA popups.

When I first installed ZA a couple of years back, I was getting my ports probed (oooh that sounds obscene) about 20-30 times an hour. Now it's about 800-1,000 an hour (since I'm on a very well-known regional DSL provider and thousands of bots are set to probe that entire IP range 24/7). |ohhhhh|