How often scan, clean, anti-spy, defrag?

[Noddy]

I got a fright recently when Firefox got directed to a porn site and shortly after Antivir quarantined trojan Zlob.CA.8.

I use PC for online banking so am paranoid about any trojan/keylogger getting in.
Zonealarm & Antivir PE are on all the time & self-updating.

After rescanning a few times with Antivir, Ad-Aware & Spybot there seems to be nothing left.
Then I cleared the browser history & ran scandisk & defrag & all seems to be well.

Zlob is a bit of an old trojan and I guess Antivir was fully capable of blocking & quarantining it, but you're left with that uneasy feeling, is something spying over my shoulder!

I do a lot of emailing & browsing, no p2p or torrents, how often should I be scanning, cleaning, defragging?

[Fabula]

Scan/clean every fortnight. Defrag every few months at most.

[Noddy]

I've heard that surfing causes a lot of fragmenting.

Do you think the security programs I'm using are adequate or should I be doing more?

[Fabula]

The programs you are using should be fine. You may want to add Trojan Remover as well.

Surfing causes fragmentation, but not much, and fragmentation is not too much of an issue anyway.

[0iD]

What you have is ok really, you have all the bases covered. It's OK to be paranoid If you're really worried get a router with firewalling capabilities or a dedicated hardware firewall. If you have a dynamic IP and dont stay online for days then hackers are not such a prob tbh. I personally defrag, virus check & spyware sweep once a week and i'm online a lot. Ad aware and Spybot is a bit of overkill, but hey, what the hell.

Things you can also try are CrapCleaner and AVG Anti Spyware (free) which has recently had some good write-ups.

But if you want the best protection, then a hardware firewall with updateable firmware, intrusion detection & stateful packet inspection is a good way to go.

[Lee H]

I've just had to run chkdsk last night on my windows raid array and this fixed the BSOD issue I was having, but in the 2 years I've had MCE2005 installed I've not ran a defrag etc and that was the first issue that was fixed within 10 minutes of loading the windows recovery console.

AV-wise, my bitdefender is scheduled to scan from 0500 every morning just to check. This covers spyware as well but once in a bluemoon I'll run the PCTools spyware doctor just to double-check and as of yet I've not had any spyware issues.

[Sinizter]

I only start a scan manually when I suspect something. Otherwise its just the autoscans which may or may not happen depending on whether the laptop it on or not.

I defragged it about 2 months ago last - since then it has been large media files moving on and off my hard drive on a somewhat regular basis. Since there is no noticeable performance difference, I havent bothered defragging since.

Havent done an anti-spyware scan in 6months or so. But then I havent really gone to any new sites that may be dodgy or installed any programs that I am not familiar with. But I might consider doing one in the near future.

At the end of the day, how often you do it is up to you. I dont bother because I am reasonably careful with my PC and so I dont do it very often. But I do keep the virus definitions upto date.

[Noddy]

Thanks for the very useful suggestions.

I've downloaded the AVG Anti Spyware (free). Your recommendation did the trick, OiD. Like you say there are good reviews around.

I manage 8 bank accounts online that's why I'm paranoid. Can't afford to be off the air for long.

Thing is, the moment a suspicion arises about a trojan/keylogger/screen scraper I have to be certain very quickly that the machine is clean. One clean bill of health from one anti-trojan program isn't enough, none of them detect 100%.

I have a basic Belkin ADSL modem/firewall/wireless router but it supports no packet inspection or traffic stats.

With 6 PCs sharing the broadband connection it would be very nice to at least have the totals per month per PC of megabytes or packets. Anyone got some good suggestions?

[speardane]

for a totally paranoid approach to surfing.

Install vmware player; install one of the pre-built browsing engines. (typically Linux based using Firefox; you won't notice the OS, only the browser) - take the option to have a separate IP address - do not bridge it to your PC - this is exactly what your trying to keep isolated!

Upside
Browse inside vmware - if it gets corrupted; re-install another
viruses etc can only travel within the browser - Linux is much less susceptible to viruses
Fragmentation, whilst browsing is contained within the vmware file


Downside
not compatible with MSIE only sites - I guess that's obvious - sorry
no cut and paste - and leave it turned off
some limitations on browser add-ins

[xAmritx]

This is my weekly schedual:
Defrag: Everyday or two
Anti Virus:Every week (i check every file i download)
Cleaning:Every day with Crapcleaner aka CCleaner
Browser:Opera or firefox (tend towards opera more) as IE is so unsecure.

Firewall:ZA Suite (use its built in AV and AS but disable after i used it and re-enable when needed like indavidual file scanning) Dont recommend ZA if u have a slow computer thos as it hogs a fair bit of resources which is nothing if you have a good pc.

[jackvdbuk]

defrag everyday? now theres a waste of time

[kidzer]

To be fair, if you do it every day, it wont take very long (vs leaving it for weeks at a time) so I can understand that logic.

[Noddy]

Install vmware player; install one of the pre-built browsing engines. (typically Linux based using Firefox; you won't notice the OS, only the browser) .....

Hi speardane, which website did you download vmware player from, I see many thru Google (me noob)?

Which Linux/firefox build did you download or did you build it yourself and how (me noob).

I think I want to boot linux/firefox from DVD rather than dualboot xp/linux ?

[speardane]

Vmware - player - http://www.vmware.com/products/player/
Vmware - player appliances - http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/

are the sites you want.

you can use these from windows as well as Linux.

Yes a DVD is a good place to start, if you want to go the Linux route. What you are looking for is a "live-disk" - this would allow you to reboot the PC into a new OS - without touching the underlying installation. You can typically use USB sticks etc.(you can get the live disks from the vendor web-sites or on the front of many magazines)

if you like it - you can then permanently install it - if you don't take the DVD out and reboot back to original.

I used Ubuntu - (Feisty Fawn) - I think the install is easier than XP nowadays (though not the same) - It comes with Firefox 2.0 pre-installed.

I have also used Mandriva and Suse happily in the past.

By and large if you want to do something out of the ordinary (or use a later version than has been packaged) - then building is an option - I have done that previously - it's not too bad - but frankly the packages are well tested and integrated - so for the last couple of years I've not found it necessary. (I use Linux more as a tool than a hobby)

[Sinizter]

I just did a full scan today because Avast found a virus on a word document in a memory stick that I plugged in (not mine).

The last time I scanned it was 25/04/07.

And the PC was clean - 0 viruses.

[Mutley]

ON my PC, I defrag every day. I also do a scan once a month.
As mentioned before, regular defrags are very quick.

Its run early in the morning - the PC auto-wakes, then a scheduled task runs a batch job that does backups, defrag, general tidying up.