Windows Security Center Part 1
Most likely new computers being shipped today will come with Windows XP Service Pack 2 already installed on them. How do you know if you have SP 2 installed? To do this go to Start>Run…>Open:<type> winver, if you see Service Pack 2 after the version it is installed on that machine. Included in this service pack is the installation of the Windows Security Center. This was included to add extra security from hackers, viruses, and spyware. The security center can be found by going to Start>Control Panel, you will then see a shield icon titled “Security Center”. By double-clicking this, it will open the security center window. It will show three main parts: Firewall, Automatic Updates, and Virus Protection. From here it is very easy to turn on and off parts of the security included in SP2. I will be discussing the automatic updates part this week. Depending on your preferences you can set your automatic Windows Updates to be downloaded anytime you want or never. If you scroll towards the bottom of the window you will see “Manage security settings for:”, here you can make changes to automatic update properties by double-clicking the icon for it. It is a good ideal to keep updating your computer on a regular basis. A example for using the “Notify me but don’t automatically download or install them:”, would be on a public computer that is locked down with Centurion Guard. If the computer is downloading updates everyday and the machine locked, it is just going to start the process over the next time the computer is restarted. This will cause a slow down when a patron is using the Internet if the updates available keep increasing in size. It might be a good ideal to setup a schedule to update public machines; this will also let the new virus definitions to be saved to the computer. One bad thing about running Windows Updates is you have to restart the machine when they are complete. With SP2 if the setting is set to automatic, Windows will wait to install them when the computer is being shutdown. More information on the Windows Security Center can be found at: http://support.microsoft.com/xpsp2installed.