[AT] Off topic, computer related.

[Ken Knierim]

Charlie,
    Obviously you have reasons to run IE but you may consider running IE for
the apps you HAVE to run them on and using something else for most other
things. In my case my primary engineering system is Windows 2000 Pro and has
IE installed for running the Windows Updates regularly. I then run Firefox
with the Adblock Plus plug-in for everything I need to use on the internet
with my engineering system (which I limit to specific work-related sites).
For everything else I run it on my base Linux system, which also runs
Firefox/ABP. Also, my engineering system runs in a VMware window on the
Linux system, and gets regular snapshot backups which a hacker would be hard
pressed to work around; it's done in the base OS. I believe that the Linux
market is a small portion of the installed PC base and most of the hackers
aren't targeting it nearly as much (which may change, of course).
    While this is a rather involved setup, reliability has been acceptable
(knock on wood). I've run the VMware configuration for numerous years with
very little crashing and it allows me to keep my old PC running in software
and allows me to surf the net fairly safely and whatnot. I also highly
recommend the AdBlock Plus plug-in; it clobbers all manner of advertisements
and really speeds my network access and de-clutters pages. The big beef I
have is with Flashplayer... that little monster seems to have some big
security holes in it. I've had a couple websites hijack that one. Funny; it
doesn't do that on my Linux system. I've also de-installed it from most of
the systems on my network since it's a problem and usually not necessary for
work.

Hope this helps somehow.

Ken in AZ