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Update (August 2010): This article was wrote in May 2009, I am currently running Windows 7 Ultimate 64 along with Ubuntu 10.04 64 on my main PC.

Well I thought that it was about time that I actually added some technical stuff to the site and a few more pages, as I have not added much to the site for the past year. I thought this would be a good thing to post about, both of my Windows setups. Currently I am running Vista Ultimate 64bit and Kubuntu on my Desktop PC. I am running Windows Mediacentre (XP SP3 with Mediacenter basically) and Debian Linux on my laptop as I use it more as a media center and for watching TV etc through a separate TFT screen. This guide shows you how to setup Windows (or how I have mine setup) and what the best security software is.

Make sure you back-up everything before re-installing, the main two things people forget about are; Emails and Bookmarks. If you use Thunderbird and Firefox you can use a program called MozBackup for backing up emails and bookmarks. External Drives are becoming ever more important with the sheer amount of data we need to backup these days, although you can get 32gb Flash sticks now too!

Well first off I thought I would just as well start off with Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate 64bit. First of all you want to install windows and activate it. The next thing that I do is install all the drivers and run XP-Antispy (now works with Vista) to change some settings and disable some things which are not really needed. Before you configure your network you have to have the computer secure, you can either use a external sourced firewall such as Comodo or the Windows built in Firewall (I use the built in firewall, mainly because I have a DMZ setup with a Linux Hardware Firewall). The next point of call is to install some AntiVirus software, recently AntiVir have released their personal version of their software for free which has a lot more functions than the previous free version, this is the AntiVirus that I use and have used for many years.

When you have installed the AntiVirus software you can setup or plug in your network. The first thing you want to do now is to update the AntiVirus and also check for windows updates, windows update may take some time and I found recently on Vista Ultimate 64bit there was a problem installing some of the updates. The next thing you want to do before going on the internet / opening a web browser is to install a good secure web browser, Internet Explorer is full of bugs and I would suggest disabling ActiveX in XP-Antispy if you intend to use it. I personally use Firefox and have done for years, it is secure and you can add add-ons such as Adblock to it… it is also extremely easy to backup data.

When you have a web browser which you like the next step is to get some kind of Anti-Spyware. I use Spybot Search and Destroy. When you install it the program will guide you through what to do, basically it will update to the latest version, when it has updated you have to run the Immunization again from the Immunize option in the program. When Immunizing the system always ensure that everything is ticked even if you don’t use some of the items listed, this will ensure other browsers installed are secure… if someone else uses Internet Explorer on your PC their not in risk of bringing in Malware/Spyware (older folk seem more inclined on using everything Microsoft). When this is installed you are pretty much protected from any of the current threats. Please review the Tweaking Windows section below.

Well for Windows XP and Mediacenter the only thing different to Windows Vista that I do is have some software running called ProcessGuard, it is not free software but is well worth buying as it will block all rootkits and it will even tell you when a program is trying to hook into a dll or another program, or even access the memory. It is extremely handy to run, but only currently works in 32bit Windows and was originally created for Windows XP. When you first install Windows XP or Mediacenter you want to make sure you have the latest Service Pack installed (currently SP3). I always write new XP CD’s with the latest Service Packs built into them. It is advised that you get all the latest Updates also on Windows XP, Microsoft were planning on stopping support for XP early, but due to the mass amount of Businesses which use it instead of Vista (because hardware has not moved as much as Microsoft would have liked), this means they will have to support XP until 2014.

There are a lot more options and a lot more flexibility in Windows XP for editing. You can disable a lot of things including a lot of services which you would probably never use anyway by using XP-Antispy.

Tweaking Windows:
I consider this part quite important where others may not. When all your software is installed then I would recommend checking for start-up services and processes which may be pretty useless and just take up memory usage. A lot of software vendors add in ‘Auto-Update’ processes to the computers start-up. You want to remove them, unless it’s software which you want to auto-update. One thing I hate about Software companies that do this is they never ask the user if they want that process running using memory! You can check the start menu->Startup folder for processes and you can also check the registry:

I recommend not editing anything in the registry unless you have technical experience with Windows Operating Systems! If you don’t know how to run the editing program in windows for the registry then I advise ignoring this section!

The key for windows start-up processes is the same in most versions of Windows; or at least in our case of Windows XP and Windows Vista, they are the same. Go to the following registry key:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Run]

In this folder you will see a list of processes which start when your computer starts (NOTE these are the Processes only and not the Services). If you think you are safe in deleting them then go ahead, for software such as Adobe Acrobat and Quicktime they place a auto-update process which can be removed.

Windows Services
Next you will want to take a look at the services running in windows, certain services will need to be running for the operating system to work sufficiently. I stop certain services from starting so that I can start them when I want to, such as Windows Update. I generally leave the service off during the week (for memory saving and to stop pop-ups from the task bar), I will initialise the Windows Update Service at the weekend to update Windows and then disable it again. You may say “Well surely this takes time” the answer is no it doesn’t when you know what you are doing. I have been a programmer for many years and have wrote some of the most impressive Data Storage Software within IT in the UK and along the way I have wrote Services! If you don’t know how to edit or where to find the Windows services settings then I suggest you don’t change any of them.

Services and start-up items are the main areas where viruses ran from, but as time has gone by people have got used to editing services and start-up items, so virus coders (criminals) have changed the way in which viruses work within Windows now.