Sun 15 Mar 2009
Cerberus Security Guard
Posted by admin under computer stuff
[4] Comments
This is a neat little program that allows you to disable a lot of windowsXP features that are less than useful and not needed by most users.
It is a free program. The download is free and the program is free.
Google on Cerberus Security Guard for the URL.
Careful here using the Security Guard program. Twice now I have had to restore from a cloned drive to get back to a working system. One that would also access the network.
Apparently there are options in the Security Guard program that nuke the ability for XP to do networking. Not sure which they are so I am re-doing this mess a third time and this time taking notes.
Will be doing that right after I do a new clone of the current running drive which is working fine.
Once again we discover that some third party software is not really compatible with the system it was (or was not) designed to support.
After installing and configuring the security guard software caused the system to issue an exception report. Not sure what that means but I do know that this is not a desired result.
So the software was permanently removed.
Guess we will have to muddle through all those many configuration features that Microsoft provides.
Also experienced some problems with the network connection. The problem occurred right after installing and configuring the security software. Figured it was the security software that was doing it. Then decided it was a NIC. Turned out it was actually a cable. Not sure how a cable can fail but after the cable was replaced, the system immediately connected to the network.
I used to take lots of time in the past to investigate things of this nature. I tried to discover the exact reason for a failure after the problem was corrected. Now days I don’t really care all that much about cause unless the problem repeats. In this case it is far cheaper just to replace the cable than to try and design a cable that will not fail. Of course we need to make sure that we don’t provide a cable made by the same vendor who made the cable that failed. Sometimes that is difficult to do. All this stuff is made in China.
For sure now that network crash was only a cable problem. The NIC on the motherboard is still good.
Just seems coincedental that the problem occurred in the middle of testing the new security-guard software. Well, don’t need that software now. Finally figured out where to tweak XP itself. Runs a lot faster now.