----- Original Message ----- From: sherlock@vsnl.com
IF the virus is in the database the AV program will find it. Usually u get infected by some uknown mutant of existing virii. >And often by a new one. The average time to infection is 4 minutes on a dialup. The average time to download a patch on a >dialup is several times longer - a rather idiotic situation. And this does not include the great OS killer win XP - SP2.
The problem is not with the av but the way the system gets bombarded with viruses from other infected cable customers on the same LAN, even when the comp is simply idle. The av did detect the viruses and that is why we were called but what happens is that the background process of detecting and quarantining the viruses takes up so much cpu power that the customer cannot do any other work at that time and gets the impression that the system hangs. Then after a minute or much more more a message pops up that the virus is safely quarantined. But this keeps on happening again and again so the cus. can't do any work. The chances of viruses coming in through dialup itself is too less as it is never 'on' all the time and every time the cus. logs in, his ip changes. A firewall keeps the unwanted elements from entering in a dialup, whereas this is not possible in LAN if the gateway itself is unsecure. The av when loaded is updated with a latest update patch already recorded on another cd, so there is no time loss. I am an XP Pro licenced user and I find the SP2 a very good improvement of security in OE and IE. As it is I had already made my comp safe and secure by various procedures, updates and 3rd party software but this made it even better. It does not download any external links in your email script. All my programs work fine. I had to manually allow some programs to access the net in its own firewall but it is a simple setting.
I find that the ethernet card transmits packets even when the os is not loaded or when the comp is shut down in an AT motherboard. This also helps in getting in the viruses before the system boots and the av is active.
Regards,
Rony.