Quote:
Originally Posted by dragonslayer48dx
Point well taken- thank you for correcting me.
I never dealt with the NT family's file system at all. My only experience was reinstalling XP on my daughter's machine 3 times in one year when it became useless from malware, despite the fortress I'd built around it. (oh, and of course, the grueling weekly routine of running anti-virus, anti-spyware, and defragmenter). Personally, I was stuck in win32 hell with win98. XP never impressed me enough to 'upgrade'. 
Cheers |
You probably won't ever need to deal with NT Based windows since you seem happy with linux, but the truth is there is a world of difference between XP and 98.
XP actually has decent mechanisms to become secure, but the default settings are for just the opposite. Since people neither know nor care, they treat it like its 98 and take no steps to secure it or even learn how. Unfortunately this is even the case with many experienced users who should know better.
Instaling antivirus and firewalls is only half the story, and in the case of AV, its actually highly overrated IMO. At the end of the day you're still running as root. One should actually only run as a limited account and only use administrator to do maintenance, just like linux.
As for defragmenting, I just don't do it because I see no difference. And large hard drives are dirt cheap these days so the probe is even less serious. fragmentation of the swap file can also be avoided by setting a fixed large size right from the start.
I know this is a linux forum and it sounds like I'm supporting windows. In reality I only say those things because I observe people all the time making the same mistakes in windows, thus not using it in its full potential. This leads to false conclusions. If you have to use it, whether you like it or not, you should take the time to learn it. Its really much more than just point 'n click through wizards.
