#microsoft #internet #security #software
Everyone and their mother has a computer, has worked on a computer, or at least seen one. We check our face books, we download a video game, we launch programs, and some of us bootleg software. In a somewhat opaque world, seeing and doing what you want, most people feel lacks any true transparency. This isn't true with an every day run of the mill OS out of the box, in fact most out of the box computers run multiple programs, and services we don't need to function. Not talking strictly a computer from Best Buy or Fry's has these problems, that little disk you buy from a store to build your own computer even comes with pointless services running.
Microsoft Windows ships and is sold as an every man operating system, your accountant can use it, your IT professional can use it, your CEO can use it, hell even your janitor can. Its designed to fit everyone's needs the minute you press that awesome power button. Although that sounds like a blessing, it is in fact a curse. The problem is why would your CEO or your secretary need access to services that an IT professional needs to run? And why would your IT professional need something that your grandmother needs to run? We simply don't need it.
This first tip is for your standard computer you buy from the store, lets say an HP or Asus from your big box retailer, sure you can go through the headache and heart burn of removing all that extra crap, disabling things, so on and so forth, but... there are easier more certain ways of getting stuff done.
You're going to get bloatware with a new computer from a store, the easiest and most accurate way of removing this extra garbage is to reload the operating system. Yes you can go buy a copy, or you can burn a copy, but a tool I like to keep around is a bootable flash drive or a DVD with a Windows AIO installed. You can go to http://getintopc.com/ and search for windows 7, windows 8, and windows 10 AIO downloadable ISO files. The beauty of this is you have every copy of windows available, is it legal? As long as you have a Activation Key yes its legal, just make sure you choose the correct version of windows, an out of the box Computer will come with an OEM Activation Key usually taped to the side or top, unless its a laptop then look underneath. Don't click ultimate if you have a Home license key, and don't choose starter if you have a business version. All windows products are the same, they just add a few extra features with the higher up versions.
This is always step one when buying a computer from a store, reload the operating system from scratch, delete all the extra garbage the computer comes with and get yourself a fresh system. Yes it sounds counter intuitive, but its worth it.
Second big tip, manage your start ups programs with MSCONFIG. Most home users don't even know this exists, if you click the start button, and type "msconfig" into the search bar and it'll bring up MSCONFIG.exe. Thats the program we are going to run, click it to open it. (you can hit windows + R as well to run it without searching for it).
On page 1 it says "normal startup", which loads everything, every service and every start up program. Which this isn't what we want. Jump over to the start up page and uncheck anything not needed to load when the computer turns on, lets be honest do we really need acrobat and microsoft office to load up some service when the computer starts up? No, it just makes that program start faster by a couple milliseconds when you go to run it. It also slows down the computers boot time by adding more things to what needs to be done when the computer comes on. This can also be done to the services, things like Microsoft's Remote Desktop services, for most home users, aren't needed, they are enabled simply because an IT professional will probably need it though.
The more start up programs and services that can be unchecked shrinks the amount of potential holes in the operating system itself. If an exploit was found for RDP on windows 7, and it was disabled, there is no harm on your end. Disabling Acrobats startup could block an exploit that runs before the anti-virus kicks in.
By blocking any potential failures before they happen, we increase our chances of being safe for longer. Talking about firewalls, Linux, and Unix, are topics for another day, I feel this post has been long enough. All +1's and reposts are appreciated, and as always, be safe my goblins.
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