OpenZA

I own a laptop that came bundled with Windows Vista. I installed Linux as fast as possible, but left Windows as a dual-boot option mainly to check that things behave nicely in Internet Explorer.

And a good thing too, because they usually don’t.

I also keep it because I own some junk hardware that also doesn’t play nicely with Linux.

I boot into it about once a month – the last time was mid-December. I always enter with trepidation, knowing I’m about to install countless Gigs of security and anti-virus updates.

This evening I booted into Windows at 22h02, and immediately kicked off the Windows, Windows Defender and AVG updates. The updates finished around 00h30, and I’ve probably blown February’s bandwidth.

Shortly after finishing, I was alerted to another update. It seems they arrive faster than I can download them.

About an hour into downloading the patch for the latest gaping hole, a dialer popped up, so a hole was probably exploited in the interim.

I’m now scanning the entire system – who knows how long that will take. Perhaps I was a bit ambitious in hoping to get back to what I was doing by, say, 22h05.

For the average user, who perhaps doesn’t appreciate Freedom, or ever run into the frustrations of not having complete control of their system, there are still two huge advantages to running Linux.

One is having access to tonnes of fantastic software in one place – the default repositories. No need to trawl the internet for dodgy freeware, or head off to Incredibly Expensive software shop to buy something that’s freely available.

The other, of course, is that the obligatory anti-virus software takes up a rather large proportion of the system’s resources, and uses up a nice chunk of your bandwidth too.

And unless you use the machine regularly (and therefore update regularly), the chances of exploitation, even if you immediately install the updates when you do log on, are high.

The scan’s still running. Perhaps I should get this blog post up before my Windows partition is formatted…

First published on Neverness.