PC Maintenance and Security Lab

I was thinking this might be a hard lab to get anything really new out of as I come from a technical background and have kept up my technical skills while venturing into the educational field. Having said that, I chose 3 tutorials that introduced me to a couple of newish concepts I found interesting.

Tutorial Title: Demonstrating Spybot's TeaTimer






I have used Spybot numerous times to rid peoples' computers of spyware/malware. My old routine used to be to run Spybot and Lavasoft's Adaware as I found that one would catch things the other wouldn't. To be perfectly honest I have neither installed on my computer now as I find that if you use Firefox and have a couple of add-ons with it you will be just fine.
I have never used the TeaTimer section of Spybot as programs like that get very annoying very fast as programs tend to change registries more often than not and you just end up disliking the constant messages that pop up. I can see that it could be useful for people who are unsure of what software or websites are genuine.

Tutorial Title: Using Sandboxie

I had never heard of Sandboxie before. It is a program you install and it can sit in between your computer and the internet trapping all of those temporary files that may contain malware or spyware. It's an interesting concept but one that I probably wouldn't undertake. It may be useful for people who really don't want to clog up their hard drives with all those spyware programs. It may be particularly useful for people who want peace of mind and take advantage of online internet banking with their bank and feel safe and secure doing so.


Tutorial 3: Using RoboForm

I knew of the existence of form and password filling programs but kind of glossed them over as unsafe. But looking through the RoboForm tutorial I began to think well, why not use it?! I have so many websites to log in to these days and I will, more often than not, forget what username and password configuration I have used. Not to mention those long annoying forms that you have to fill in on 99% of all websites. So I'm going to download and use it on my home computer and see how it goes. The only downside in my mind is the security issue, yes you can password protect your actual passwords for specific sites but there's still something in my mind that says it's a bit dodgy but I'm going to learn and shift my thinking as I go on this one.