Going Live with AVG and Zone Alarm

After a succesful set of tests over the weekend, I decided to switch on AVG and Zone alarm on our 'Office' PC.

I now need to spend a life time 'allowing' all the apps that I use to access the internet. Having previously used the Symantec Firewall tool, I find Zone Alarm rather similar and no great problem to switch to. It seems to be blocking what I expect and so can't complain.

Also installed and turned on AVG and it's getting updates once a day (limitation of the free version).

Remote Support Continued...

Tried again to get the remote support going with VNC. I now have a VPN into my network, but have problems resolving the machine name and therefore can't connect.

I've spent so long messing around with this that I've decided to ditch Trillian as the Messenger and try again with MS Messenger (even though I hate it really). At least the integration with the Remote Help is integrated.

The whole VNC and Remote access thing is a job for another day.

Remote Support

Been testing out how to do remote support. The Microsoft method using remote assistance is very connected with IE and MS Messenger which is a pain as I'm using Trillian at the moment. I tried sending an assistance request by e-mail, but, it's a bit...well...clunky.

My approach now is to try VNC, that means some Firewall and port forwarding work.

Phase 1 - Testing the suite

OK, so I built up my laptop with all that software and did some initial basic testing. It all seems to work OK. The priority was the Antivirus and Firewall first of all. I'm pleasantly surprised that AVG and Zone Alarm appear to function just as well as Norton ever did. AVG certainly intercepted my free supply of trojans that I receive from one of my ISPs without any problems.

Next was to make sure that Thunderbird works OK. My wife and I share a mail account so being able to share the mailbox is important. I found a way to do this by setting up in one user first using the local folders for storage and then making a copy of the profile before setting up the second user. The copied local folders was moved into the 'shared documents' folder and the locations editied inside Thunderbird. It was a bit tricky getting it to work, but, it seems OK, so we'll see how that goes when we go live in couple of weeks time.

Hint for Outlook to Thunderbird switchers: Keep Microsoft Outlook until you've migrated everything across. Thunderbird calls some APIs from Outlook to do the conversions and without it you can't convert anything.

Where to start...?

First task was to identify the software to build up this 'free PC'. Here is the starting list after a little research:

• 7Zip
• Adobe Acrobat Reader
• Apple iTunes
• AVG Antivirus (Free Edition)
• Gimp
• Irfanview
• jAlbum
• Lavasoft AdAware
• MS Messenger
• Mozilla Firefox
• Mozilla Thunderbird
• Open Office 2.0
• Picasa
• Skype
• SpyBot Search & Destroy
• VNC Viewer
• Yahoo Konfabulator
• Zone Alarm (Free Edition)

There are things in that list that aren't going to be used by my Father in Law, but, this is as much about me going opensource or free as it is him, so I had to make up a full suite that would work for both of us.

There are one or two items in there that some people might not agree with (MS Mesenger), but, it's free and it works (I tried Trillian for about a month and to be honest, it drove me nuts in the end so it's off the list for now)

iTunes may also be controversial, but, again. it's free and we have two iPods at home so it's on the list.

Why am I doing this...?

A month ago, my father in law told us he wanted to get on the internet (He'd had dial up e-mail until now), but, his computer was a little bit 'past its best'. So started a journey to find a way to provide at limited cost a PC based environment that:

a) ...he would be familiar with (That meant Windows XP Home, just for my sanity)

b) ...would do everything he needed to do (Word Processing, Spreadsheets, E-Mail).

c) ...could be supported by my wife and I from a distance.

The biggest issue was the 'office' software (he'd been using a combination of very old versions of Microsoft and Lotus software). At the time, when all this started, we were also using MS Office, but, it was time for an update...coincidentally, OpenOfficeOrg had just released Version 2.0 of OpenOffice and had therefore sparked my interest in the 'Free as in Beer' possibilities of Open Source software.

Over the coming weeks and months, you will be able to read about our experiences and the realities of actually using and supporting a PC built up from Open Source or Freeware software.

I'm not an OpenSource evangelist, neither have I had the time to learn Linux (maybe one day), I just want a PC that works, that my father in law and my wife can use, and, most importantly, doesn't take hours to support.