Meet the New Boss; Same as the Old Boss...
At our May meeting we closed nominations for chapter offices, then re-elected the current slate of officers. Dave Eden will begin his second year as chapter President; Tim Feldman will be Vice President; and Tony Barcellos will continue holding the offices of Secretary and Treasurer. Our thanks go to all of the members who turned out for the election; we will continue to try to serve you well.
Of the services that we provide, our members seem to most appreciate our technical advice (garnered through many years of sometimes-bitter experience!). We have been discussing PC security recently, describing the risks of online computing, and giving advice on how members can protect their systems and their private information.
Personal Firewalls and the ILOVEYOU Virus...
For example, we have been describing personal firewalls such as ZoneAlarm, from ZoneLabs. In the wake of the recent ILOVEYOU virus, ZoneLabs has updated ZoneAlarm to block damage from viruses that use Visual Basic Script e-mail attachments. ZoneAlarm is free for personal use, and low-cost for businesses. Check out ZoneAlarm "Version 2.1 with MailSafe."
Several of our members have installed it since we started discussing it, and since that time they have noticed many blocked attacks on their systems. I see at least one attempt for every hour of time I am online with an ordinary telephone connection; one user with a DSL connection sees an average of one attempt every five minutes! Obviously, it is time for all users to become conscious of security issues.
A Sacrifice...
Since these security threats are constantly changing, there are no absolute guarantees that your system won't be damaged, or co-opted as an unwitting tool for launching attacks against other systems. One possible solution that I have been exploring is to use a small PC as my only online presence and tool for Internet access.
This system would have an external modem so that I could easily see whether it was online. It would have a small hard disk with absolutely no private information or expensive software on it -- just some antivirus tools and enough software to handle e-mail and browse the Web. If I wanted to send e-mail, I would compose the messages on another system on a floppy diskette and send them from the online PC. If I received e-mail that I wanted to save, I would cut and paste its text (and only its text - no attachments!) onto a floppy, and save that. Similarly for material downloaded from the Web.
The online PC would not have a network connection, so that it was isolated from my other systems. It would have a CD-ROM drive, and I would have a quick method for restoring a known-good copy of the operating system and tools to the hard disk from a CD-ROM (e.g., something like the Ghost disk imaging utility). That way, if I felt that anything had gotten through and infected the system, I could format the hard drive and quickly bring the system back up (in fact, I'd probably reformat and reinstall the system on a regular basis, just to make sure that it held no hidden viruses waiting to run). My other systems would be unaffected, because they would have no way to connect to the Internet.
I call this dedicated online PC a "sacrificial PC." Sound drastic? Sound like a hassle? Maybe; but it would sure be less of a hassle than wiping the hard disk and reinstalling all the software and data on my main PC!
More Hassles of the Information Age...
If you have a fairly new PC, there is a chance that its motherboard uses the Intel 820 chipset (the "chipset" is the collection of circuits that help the CPU and the RAM). Recently Intel announced that it had made a batch of flaky 820 chips, and that they had been shipped in some motherboards.
Specifically, if your system:
1. Has an Intel 820 chip set.
2. Does not use RDRAM memory.
3. Was shipped after October 1999.
4. Is not in a mobile computer, such as a laptop or a notebook computer...
...then you might have a flaky 820 "Memory Translator Hub" chip that might make your system reboot or freeze up at random. Whee! One of our members actually seems to have had this problem; it was fixed by replacing his new motherboard with an older motherboard!
To find out if your system is affected, check out this Intel Web page. It will tell you how to identify affected systems (by downloading some test software from Intel); and it will tell you what to do if your system is affected.
A Happier Note...
Let's end this column with something cheerier. Maybe you've installed a zillion fonts for your PC over the years; or maybe you've bought one of those cheap CDs that contain a zillion fonts. If so, you may have noticed that installing all those fonts on your PC really slows down Windows when it starts up.
Of course, if you just keep the fonts on the CD without installing them, your PC won't slow down. You can just install the fonts that you need, when you need them, and you can uninstall them when you are done with them. The problem with that is that the cheap font CDs usually don't come with a hardcopy showing all of the fonts on the CD (the CDs are cheap because they skimp on little things, like showing you samples of the fonts they hold!).
I recently found a nice program for solving these problems. It lets you quickly view all the fonts that you own, whether they are installed or not--it can show you uninstalled fonts on a CD. It also lets you easily install and uninstall fonts, rename them, group them into your own collections, print samples, and so on. Best of all, it's freeware! Check out "The Font Thing," version 0.8, for Windows 95, 98 and NT, at Sue Fisher's Web site.
One nice thing that Sue has done is to prepare her program for downloading in two different packages. One includes "The Font Thing" and its help files along with an install program, and is over 1 MB long. The other version has "The Font Thing" and its help files, but has no installer program, and is less than half that size.
Since her installation instructions are quite clear, you can download the smaller package and install "The Font Thing" yourself, saving a long download time. Check it out!
Next Month...
You can also come on down and check out the "new" chapter officers. New! Improved! More sudsing action! More bells! More whistles! ...and so on. Well, truth be told, we're the same officers that you're used to... and in fact, Dave Eden will be gone on vacation, so you won't even see him. But we'll still be having a good time (sorry, Dave!), and we'll still give away great door prizes to chapter members. See you there!
—
Tim Feldman
