<font color=skyblue>I have alot of security on my machine...trying to go the free route instead of buying something. Let me tell you what I have, then you tell me if one or more cancel each other out in productivity, resulting in loss of perfomance from my PC.
<font color=lightgreen>
Zone Alarm (Firewall)

Spybot (Cleans and also has a BHO detection, which stops unwanted downloads or changes)

Ad-aware (Cleans)

Hijack This (deletes unwanted crap that tries to own your PC)

Spyware Guard (BHO detection, stopping unwanted downloads or changes)

Spyware Blaster (Stops download of most Spyware to prevent ever needing to be cleaned out).

MRU Blaster (Deletes all files that contain info on surfing activity)</font>

To the best of my knowledge, I believe I have accurately described all functions factually.

Do any of these take away from the productivity of another, for example, do I want The Spyware Guard if Spybot also has a feature that protects BHO stuff? (From what I understand, BHO stuff refers to browser hijacking.)</font>

[ 01-19-2004, 01:21 PM: Message edited by: Larry_OHF ]

ROFL! Talk about paranoia!
You have a lot of redundancy there, for example spybot and ad-aware fulfil pretty much the same functions AFAIK.
Also, how many of those are memory-resident? Since that is what gives a performance hit. Sounds like far too much paranoia to me, I just use Zone Alarm and spybot like once a month if I can be bothered and have no problems.
As far as MRU blaster is concerned - who cares if someone somewhere can see taht I've visited IW today (etc.)?

That's four or five programs with the same function you have overthere, isn't that a bit much ?

I am only running three (Zone Alarm, Spybot & Adaware) of the above items and I think it is good enough.

The way I think about the PC security issue as a home user:

1) Nobody knows or cares about you (in terms of your computer). The chance of you in particular being a target or any sort of infiltration attack is 1 in several million.

2)What's the worst they can do? Run some script? access your files? At the very very worst you reinstall windows. But keep backups of important stuff, keep a backup of the registrey and applications on a seperate partition and you can be up and running in no time.

3) You always have ultimate control - just disconnect from the web if you think anything funny is going on.

4) 99.9% of spy and adware is just advertising companies gathering harmless data - scan once a month with spybot.

5)Your firewall should stop ANY unknown traffic anyway - until you tell it to let a certain program through so diallers etc. will get stopped.

Is it really worth worrying so much and spending so much time researching, installing, updating, using all this "security" stuff? Don't we all have better things to worry about?

[ 01-19-2004, 01:48 PM: Message edited by: Vaskez ]

<font color=skyblue>Adaware finds things that Spybot does not. Spybot sometimes finds things that Adaware never does. The firewall is obvious, Hijack this helps me get rid of things like that annoying desktop tray icon that Quicktime puts on there everytime I watch a video that is posted on this website to see, MRU blaster just cleans up space to get rid of temp files that cannot be easily deleted with the normal deletion of the items in the temp folder, Spyware Blaster keeps 90% of all the junk off my PC in teh first place so that I do not have to run Spybot or Adaware every day, and Spyware Guard protects my machine from hijack attempts that take over my browser, as other people here on IW has said they have suffered in the past...the most recent,,,the guy that said that the yellowpages.com had taken over his browser.

All of them seem to be doing thier job very well. </font>

LOL I bet all these complaints of having browsers taken over are with Internet explorer ....if people just used decent browsers......

LOL! That's a lot indeed...

What i use: Trend Micro Internet Security, Spybot and Ad-aware.

now my antivirus there already stops almost all there is... if something gets through, I just clean it up with the two. [img]smile.gif[/img] Easy and doesn't really kill my PC's performance... so I feel secure... ;)