Vista security for Mother-in-law

Hi all,

As an XP user with no experience in Vista, I have been asked by my mother-in-law to install Vista on her machine. The PC meets the sys reqs for installation, but being unfamiliar with the OS and what antimalware may work best for a total novice, I thought I would pick the brains of my fellow users here.

Can anyone recommend a good, light and user friendly Vista protection plan for fighting malware?

 

Vista Firewall control, using Vista's own firewall

Using UAC with Norton UAC tool to remember what she has chosen

Microsoft Defender as advanced member sharing threats, deselect daily scan, will get her daily updates.

Avira free (AV, AS)

regards Kees

 

yes indeed: DefenseWall Hips
http://www.softsphere.com/
the easiest and most secure application againts malware out the box ready problem free

 

Kees,

Where does it say you get daily updates without having daily scans checked provided you are an advanced member?

I can't find any reference.

Thanks,
Ian

 

Vista really isn't that different than XP. It was fairly easy to find my way around on my sis's new Vista computer. I set her up with a user (non-admin) account and after her Norton trial was up I turned on the Vista firewall, and installed Avast free on her machine. I can't remember whether or not I turned on Defender...

All seems to be working fine and if she starts to complain about the UAC prompts I'll try the Norton UAC tool Kees1958 mentioned.

 

Sorry Iangh daily checks, you can uncheck daily scans in the setup or program options or something like that. The advanced membership, seems to come with some additional benefits (not a seperate option as far as I can remember). I have not used MsDefender for quite a while, so may be others can confirm whether is still applicable.

Regards Kees

 

Yep that is even better (a limited account), you must tweak the Registry settings see old post https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=185220

I think the "ConsentPromptBehaviorUser" has to be set to 1, most of this post still applies, only with Norton UAC you can set UAC to normal in stead of quiet mode.

Regards Kees

 

That is the easiest way of fully protected in admin mode, set UAC to quiet and also install Norton's UAC tool, you can run Avast with its Internet mail and web browser modules enabled for a full protecton.

 

This is the setup I made for my parents: Avast, Vista firewall, Windows defender, UAC.
And most important thing: One limited user account for daily work. Another PURELY for banking/ebay etc. This eliminates majority of major threats.

Avoid sofware that give pop-ups. Use, e.g., Vista firewall as such. They probably wouldn't know when answer yes/no for outbound queries.

 

Enable the Vista firewall, as mentioned earlier.

Enable auto-updates in Windows for the OS and Office products.

Enable auto-updates for other software (e.g., Adobe Flash, Adobe Acrobat, Sun Java, Firefox, any chat clients they use). This is better than nothing, but doesn't always work very well. The free program Secunia PSI helps more with this. (I have no experience with LUA mentioned earlier so I don't know how this utility would interact with it.)

Completely turn off the autorun feature since nobody needs it:

http://antivirus.about.com/od/securitytips/ht/vista_autorun.htm