after 4 or more years i finnaly get broadband .... what now

[wellard]

Broadband wooot!!!

supposedly 1.5mbps! my dial up was running at 28kbps for the last 6 months, so the differance is huge

For those that do not know about my long running battle with the telco's in Australia to have broadband fitted to our house I will not bore you with the ALL the details, but even when I was having this new house constructed they refused to put optic cable or anything other than a 1900's era copper line to my house no matter how much I offered to pay. The time wasted by me and Carolyn since then trying to get a broadband connection was like banging our heads against a wall ... Still here we are at last.

So what now?

How should I protect my computer / firewall for broadband? I have norton but I guess it is set up for dial up do I need to alter settings? Having the connection on 24/7 is a bit disturbing should I keep it turned off?

How do I check my speed?

The modem is connected to the computer via the USB port, is the ethernet port any faster?

[Vaskez]

Get hold of kerio personal firewall. Out of the free ones it is the best I've found. Much more configurable than the free version of Zone Alarm. I've been using it for years and never had any problems.

You can check your download speed with online speed tests, just search for "download speed test" or something similar. To see your current speed, well your firewall e.g. kerio will tell you that.

Also make sure you have spybot installed.

The Ethernet standard is typically faster than the USB port, but you can't connect a modem to an Ethernet port, lol. Ethernet is a local area networking carrier sense collision detection-type protocol and ADSL or whatever you have uses a completely different, non-compatible protocol. Besides your connection to the ISP would be the bottleneck in the download speed, not your local connection between modem and computer

[Felix The Assassin]

Welcome aboard. Norton? It should be just fine. There is no other that can compare. Just go into options/configuration and plug-in the variables. (Me tinks) It has been sooo long since I have needed/used Anti-V or firewall.

Speed test. My personal preference is from cnet, which BTW, is the same as that other website from that winders feller uses.
http://reviews.cnet.com/7004-7254_7-0.html
There are others, but you must keep in mind that you are allowing a send/receive algorithm to execute. Without a good firewall, and or anti-v, who knows what you can receive?

And,as pointed out for windoze, you will also need two or three antispyware programs as well, sheez. Will you have any CPU power left over?

[Arvon]

Here's a speed checker that seems ok... http://www.2wire.com/

[ 03-29-2006, 09:00 PM: Message edited by: Arvon ]

[Harkoliar]

since you have norton.. its good enough.. but once your subscription runs out.. zonealarm, avg would be a good back up. and dont forget adaware for spyware.

good going on ya mate

[Hivetyrant]

I use Zonealarm, and I swear by it

[Bungleau]

I'll address the protection and connection questions...

First off, I'd put in a hardware firewall of some kind. A Linksys router/firewall will do just fine, and you can connect your cable or DSL modem to it, and connect your computer to the Linksys.

Use a software firewall as well, like ZoneAlarm. The hardware firewall will prevent stuff from coming in while the software one will also keep stuff from coming out.

Use ethernet connections on both sides, and you'll be happiest. USB connectivity goes up to 500kbps, or about half a megabit. 10-baseT, the low-speed ethernet, is 10mbps, or 20 times faster. Most LAN connections these days use 100mbps, or 200 times faster. Use ethernet, and the slow point in your network will never be you... [img]smile.gif[/img]

[Eagle eye]

You guys are lucky.
Supposedley we have the slowest broadband in the world...

[dplax]

I myself use Sygate Personal Firewall. Since Sygate have been bought by Symantec, there is no technical support for the firewall and no new updates either, but because of that, no one even attacks the Sygate firewall. You can still find downloads for it at some download sites. I think I got mine from here..

I switched away from ZoneAlarm in December, after it failed to protect me from a hacking attempt originating in Estonia, after which I had to do a system restore to make the PC work again.

About spyware: I have found that if you use a good firewall, a good antivirus and a browser which isn't IE, then running spyware checks only once a month is more than enough. For that you can run the checks online, there are a few websites which scan. (IIRC trend micro is one of them)

[johnny]

I'm not so sure anymore about Zone Alarm, it interferes with everything you want to install on your PC, it forgot it's intentional purpose, which is blocking out crap.

Wellard, you're joking on the 1.5 Mbps, right ? Because overhere we're at 6.1 Mbps.