Critical Scribe
11-06-2006, 09:38 AM
I started college this past September and as a gift my mother surprized me with a visit from the UPS truck that month. He had me sign for a box containing a brand spanking new Acer laptop.
I have built maybe a hundred computers for myself and an extended family since I took apart an IBM XT-88 in 1994 to see "how it worked." I have never owned a laptop or been very proficient with them, and never had the need to bother with them or a WIFI card or network.
Well, I could clearly see the ease and advantage of WIFI at home so I swapped out our ages old 3com router for a wireless linksys/vonage built-in thing and had us up and running with full security and no SSID, etc at home.
Well...I connect to the "dirty" wifi network at college. The drive on my laptop is partitioned in half with FAT32, the second partition is where I keep "My Documents", the entire partition. I have this shared at home of course so I can type and edit files etc from my desktop and have the laptop sitting nearby to share those files.
I installed zonealarm, spybot search and destroy with Tea Timer on the laptop. I've always been a security freak, I use AVAST AV scanner on both desktops and the laptop as well and am very happy with that FREE product...(up yours McAfee.)
My home network has a specific naming schema, the laptop is named to be a part of this network. When I am connecting to the public WIFI at college, will another machine be able to access my second partition and/or change files? I know what happens when we "assume" but I need to make sure. I don't have any juicy information like bank accounts or the like on the laptop, but I don't want some little bastard deciding it will be fun to delete or alter or steal my term papers either from his laptop 3 rooms down.
Zone Alarm has been popping up dozens of warnings over the past several weeks about Netbios attempts to connect from 10.10.x.x machine using ports in the ranges of 49000+ I finally had to tell it to stop informing me and just block all and any attempts because I was so tired of being stopped from what i was doing with the dam popup windows.
On a side note, are laptops always so sluggish or is my desktop abnormally zippy? The video on the laptop seems really choppy most of the time and in general things are just sluggish:
Desktop:
Abit A8N SLI premium board
4400 Athlon X2 dual-core
2gig ram
(2) 250gb Seagate SATA barracudas
Nvidia 7800GTX
WinXP Pro
Laptop:
AMD Turion 64 (1500mhz I believe)
1.5gig ram (512 plus a 1gig corsair I added)
80gig Western Digital little bitty drive cut in half
SiS integrated graphics card, 256meg of system ram (main reason I put more ram in the thing to speed up graphics.)
I have built maybe a hundred computers for myself and an extended family since I took apart an IBM XT-88 in 1994 to see "how it worked." I have never owned a laptop or been very proficient with them, and never had the need to bother with them or a WIFI card or network.
Well, I could clearly see the ease and advantage of WIFI at home so I swapped out our ages old 3com router for a wireless linksys/vonage built-in thing and had us up and running with full security and no SSID, etc at home.
Well...I connect to the "dirty" wifi network at college. The drive on my laptop is partitioned in half with FAT32, the second partition is where I keep "My Documents", the entire partition. I have this shared at home of course so I can type and edit files etc from my desktop and have the laptop sitting nearby to share those files.
I installed zonealarm, spybot search and destroy with Tea Timer on the laptop. I've always been a security freak, I use AVAST AV scanner on both desktops and the laptop as well and am very happy with that FREE product...(up yours McAfee.)
My home network has a specific naming schema, the laptop is named to be a part of this network. When I am connecting to the public WIFI at college, will another machine be able to access my second partition and/or change files? I know what happens when we "assume" but I need to make sure. I don't have any juicy information like bank accounts or the like on the laptop, but I don't want some little bastard deciding it will be fun to delete or alter or steal my term papers either from his laptop 3 rooms down.
Zone Alarm has been popping up dozens of warnings over the past several weeks about Netbios attempts to connect from 10.10.x.x machine using ports in the ranges of 49000+ I finally had to tell it to stop informing me and just block all and any attempts because I was so tired of being stopped from what i was doing with the dam popup windows.
On a side note, are laptops always so sluggish or is my desktop abnormally zippy? The video on the laptop seems really choppy most of the time and in general things are just sluggish:
Desktop:
Abit A8N SLI premium board
4400 Athlon X2 dual-core
2gig ram
(2) 250gb Seagate SATA barracudas
Nvidia 7800GTX
WinXP Pro
Laptop:
AMD Turion 64 (1500mhz I believe)
1.5gig ram (512 plus a 1gig corsair I added)
80gig Western Digital little bitty drive cut in half
SiS integrated graphics card, 256meg of system ram (main reason I put more ram in the thing to speed up graphics.)