If you dump Internet Explorer for Mozilla Firefox and dump Outlook for Mozilla Thunderbird, you'll eliminate 90+% of your vulnerability to spyware, viruses and trojan horses.

Those two programs are the biggest security holes in MS-Windows and outright replacing them will do more for your system's health and security than any service pack from MS.

Once you've installed firefox, the first thing you should do is go get the AdBlock extension which makes it super easy to zap ads (or any other annoying images). There are also a whole bunch of other extensions available, some of them very cool, some of them totally useless. My advice is to go easy on the extensions until you've become used to firefox, some of the more amatuer extensions can make firefox crash-prone.

I also recommend getting the Noia 2.0 theme for Firefox, it really spiffs up the look of the browser.

Also, for what it is worth, Mozilla is Free software as in Freedom of speech, not just free to copy. It is the same idea that is behind Linux which some of you may have heard of as being an operating system that is becoming increasingly more popular (and which our very own vehicross.info webserver happens to be running).

Free means you can do whatever you want with it, copy it, even change and use it as a building block for your own creation if you are so inclined. It is a new (and also very old) way of looking at "intellectual property" and it is already changing the world, especially outside of the USA where Microsoft, Hollywood and the music industry have a lot less control over the local governments. But, even if you personally couldn't care less about new economic models, you can still benefit from them by using Mozilla Firefox and sharing it with as many people as you can. (an idea shared can become infinitely more useful and powerful than an idea kept locked up and secret)


As for NTLM authentication, yefim go download the 1.0 Preview Release or newer. NTLM has made its way into Firefox builds for the last month or so. Configuration is a little ugly, but functional:

1) Type "about:config" (no spaces) in the URL/Address field and hit return.
2) Type ntlm in the new Filter: box
3) You should get two entries, the one named network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris is where you place the name of each domain you want to enable NTLM support for, seperated with commas. For example: "foo.com, https://bar.com, http://baz.com"
4) That's it, it should work now for the specified domains as long as you got the syntax right.