My own MacBook Pro

Washington Post

Perils in Parallels? - Security Fix has picked up some discussions and my own opinion is:-

I was an early adopter of Parallels and it has been excellent value -- the betas are free to me.

A windows VM is a windows machine and has to be carefully managed like any other WinXP Sp2 machine

(Don't touch Vista for one year as an update until Sp1 at least - if you remember Windows SE - new Vista machines OK)

Anti-virus
AVG or Norton freebie (with Google Pack)

Anti-spyware
Adaware, Spybot , Spyware blaster

Firewall
WinXp Sp2 and Sygate Personal FireWall

Parental controls to block unsuitable content
no children - or a restricted log on

Anti-spam e-mail protection
Google mail and AOL mail are OK
the latest Hotmail has poor filters

I have not used ISP email or NNTP services for many years to make travel easier and let me get a best value connection by chnaging ISP as the (now broadband and telephony) market place moves

Talk3 International
£ 9.99 per month + TalkTalk line rental - £11 + Free Broadband
and the local exchange now running at up to 8 mbs after the BT update at Chelmsley Wood last week

News.Individual.NET » USENET NNTP:
"# more than 25,000 newsgroups from over 220 hierarchies (no binaries)
# spam filtering"
# the old Berlin University system updated

posted by Hugh W @ 2:52 pm