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Re: What's your modus operandi?
de Mel 05/23/2006 01:00
"Susan Bugher" <sebugher@yahoo.com> wrote in message news:4de4sbF1a27svU1@individual.net...
> Software is a "black box" - a door that's waiting to be opened. What's
> the best way to find out what's behind the door? (Is it a lady or a tiger?)
>
> What's your modus operandi before downloading/ installing a program?
> What checks do you make? What order do you make them in? IMO (YMMV) the
> first order of business is to find out about the author. If they are
> well known and trusted little additional checking is needed. . .
I usually just take a quick look at the author's site. Sometimes
I google for the program name and look for any references
to spyware. Also if the author's site attempts to install any activex
components I check them out (one of the reasons I stopped
using kill-bits to block spyware in IE).
My hard drive is divide into three partitions, I have a small system
partition which I keep an image of on a cd-rw so I can revert back to
a known good install. This takes under 10 minutes + about half an
hour to install the latest Microsoft security fixes and to create an
updated image.
If I have some reservation or other about a program, I keep the last
partition on my hard drive as a small test partition which I can restore
from the same disk image.(I have a boot manager installed on floppy)
I also have windows 98 installed as a virtual machine
(using vmware player) which I can very quickly unzip a fresh
copy of and install stuff on. The virtual drive image expands
(and can be shrunk back down) so it doesn't take a huge amount
of space.
If I have problems with a program not uninstalling cleanly, and for
some reason or other don't want to revert to my image, providing
it wasn't installed when I made my image. I install and run the
program on my test partition while monitoring with Total uninstall,
then transfer the "tun" file to my data partition and use a script
to remove all the registry keys the program added. I can
usually manually recover any modified system files from my disk image.
Mel.