rotecting your family and friends.
Two common areas of concern with many of you are how best to keep your
computer virus free and how to keep the kids from inadvertently surfing over
to adult-rated websites.
We-Blocker. We have been testing this free web blocking program for
the past several weeks. It is available as a free download from www.we-blocker.com
.. we find it easy to use 'right out of the box' and simple to customize and
configure.
We-Blocker gives parents the opportunity to monitor their children's
Internet access and provide them with age-appropriate content, while
filtering out sites that contain adult material.  In
addition, We-Blocker lets parents help other parents by sharing their
requests for websites that they want to see filtered. The "We" in
We-Blocker stands for our collective community, made up of all We-Blocker
users. Working together, "We" CAN make the Internet safe for
everyone. Recommended.
Norton Antivirus (NAV). If you are on the Internet for browsing or
email, sooner or later you will likely bump into a virus. See www.sarc.com
(the main Symantec Norton Antivirus website) for a current list of the most
dangerous 'wild' viruses out there, what they can do and how they work. You
will also find there a listing of 'hoax' or fake viruses. The only way to
protect yourself and your program and data files is to invest in an antivirus
protection/scanner program. With AOpen motherboards, a CD copy of Norton
Antivirus is included. However, even if you have an installed anti-virus
program, it is still important to keep that program updated with the latest
list of known viruses. New threats and variants on old threats are discovered
all the time. By updating the list of known viruses, the program can continue
to protect you. Later versions of NAV have a button called 'Live Update' to
automatically connect to the internet and perform the update. You can also
download an intelligent update file from the www.sarc.com
website to update the virus list for you. We suggest that this be done
monthly.
NAV Manual Update Procedure (fairly simple, despite my meandering how-to
instructions below):
- Connect to the www.sarc.com website,
and click on Downloads
- Under Virus Protection click on the Virus
Definition Updates link.
- In the Download Virus Definitions section click on the Download
Virus Definitions Updates link.
- Select 'English, US' and click the 'Download Updates' button.
- You are then presented (finally) with the page listing the Windows
95/ME/XP update files available for download (i.e. in this case www.symantec.com/avcenter/download/pages/US-N95.html).
- Just to remain somewhat confusing, there are several versions of the
download file .. one large update file (i32) .. the same file broken up
into FD size pieces (i32n) .. and a version for old NAV versions (x86).
Most likely you will want to get the one large update file .. the first one
on the list.
- Click on the link (e.g. '1101i32.exe' .. they use the month and day in
the filename by convention, so you can easily tell when the file was
created.
- Tell it where to download to (e.g. to your Desktop), and then OK to
start the transfer.
- After the program has successfully been downloaded to your computer,
find the program icon (i.e. hopefully on your Desktop) and click to run. A
message will be displayed in a minute or so indicating that the file has be
updated.
- The next time a virus scan is done, the new list will be used to scan
for viruses.
p.s. You can see what the last virus definition update was by running the
Norton Antivirus program. For NAV 200x, the date is listed on the first
screen on the line 'Virus Definitions'. For all other versions, click on
Help, About, Norton Antivirus to view the date of last virus definition file
update.
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