Post #4130 · 03-21-11 10:28:32 PM
Mhm, I was trying to use Skype, and though it worked, it ate up so much CPU power that it couldn't keep up. After between a few minutes and a few seconds it would start cutting out horribly and/or drop the connection to my Bluetooth headset. Made it pretty well unusable.
My antivirus/general crapware protection system has several layers, in order from least to most important:
- Linux, for which not much malware exists, and which is designed to be very secure;
- AdBlock, which keeps out crap that might try to infect Firefox;
- NoScript, which keeps out lots of crap that might try to infect Firefox;
- General knowledge about computer security;
- Common sense.

I kinda feel like computers should have a little status display area like Conky or Samurize, shipped with the OS and enabled by default, showing vital stats like CPU usage, memory/swap usage, disk space, and network activity, and people should be educated on what they mean and how to interpret them. (Mine also displays the top three processes for CPU, RAM and I/O, but that does take up a fair bit of space that wouldn't be terribly nice on smaller screens.) It's like the dashboard gauges in a car. Some just have a warning light that comes on once something's already gone wrong, but professionals prefer to have the actual gauges that can alert them to a potential problem before it actually occurs. And really, they're ridiculously easy to read and understand, much like the aforementioned stats. Cars are complex machines, computers are complex machines; both should be treated as such.
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