tepi
December 7th, 2003, 12:04 AM
Although I used to be a fairly relaxed individual, somewhere along the line I seem to have become firmly convinced that “You can never be too secure.” Since then I seem to have spent most of my time haunting a wide range of security-oriented sites, trying to assimilate whatever wasn’t completely beyond my brain, and testing dozens of programs, all of which promised to enhance my security in one way or another.
In this never-ending search for greater security, one of the more useful sites I visited was that of BlackViper. What I learned there was that the computers we buy have been set up primarily for the convenience of business users, and that they incorporate dozens of services, etc., some of which are unnecessary and even dangerous to the home PC user and serve only to waste valuable resources.
BlackViper gives a fairly detailed list of most of these services, with full descriptions of each, along with suggestions as to which ought to be reset from automatic to manual and which ought to be disabled outright. Since he seemed to be offering valuable advice, advice that would in a sense ‘trim’ my system, I took it and have since noticed an increase in my free RAM of around 20-25 MB. Good stuff! But what an effort it involved! And reading up on and disabling each service while keeping a careful record in case things went haywire and it became necessary to re-enable them was simple compared with some of the things other sites are recommending that we do.
My dream now is of a comprehensive program, a sort of ‘system trimmer,’ that would simplify the task of once and for all shutting down that welter of dangerous and totally unnecessary and resource-wasting bits and pieces which have been built into Windows. If anyone knows of such a program I’d be eternally grateful if they’d let me know. Others who may just want to enhance their security while, as a bonus, “freeing up 12-70 MB of RAM depending on system” should head for BlackViper’s Windows Services Configuration pages at http://www.blackviper.com/index.html I think that if, like me, much of Windows remains a big mystery to you, you’ll find them truly useful
Cheers.
In this never-ending search for greater security, one of the more useful sites I visited was that of BlackViper. What I learned there was that the computers we buy have been set up primarily for the convenience of business users, and that they incorporate dozens of services, etc., some of which are unnecessary and even dangerous to the home PC user and serve only to waste valuable resources.
BlackViper gives a fairly detailed list of most of these services, with full descriptions of each, along with suggestions as to which ought to be reset from automatic to manual and which ought to be disabled outright. Since he seemed to be offering valuable advice, advice that would in a sense ‘trim’ my system, I took it and have since noticed an increase in my free RAM of around 20-25 MB. Good stuff! But what an effort it involved! And reading up on and disabling each service while keeping a careful record in case things went haywire and it became necessary to re-enable them was simple compared with some of the things other sites are recommending that we do.
My dream now is of a comprehensive program, a sort of ‘system trimmer,’ that would simplify the task of once and for all shutting down that welter of dangerous and totally unnecessary and resource-wasting bits and pieces which have been built into Windows. If anyone knows of such a program I’d be eternally grateful if they’d let me know. Others who may just want to enhance their security while, as a bonus, “freeing up 12-70 MB of RAM depending on system” should head for BlackViper’s Windows Services Configuration pages at http://www.blackviper.com/index.html I think that if, like me, much of Windows remains a big mystery to you, you’ll find them truly useful
Cheers.