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Moving from mac to windows

#61
bassman314 said:
When I was still on a Win PC at home, I had a Firewall that blocked pretty much everything but FireFox, Skype, and MSN IM. Any program that had never contacted the internet had to ask, and I usually denied access. It was a third party Firewall, so even MS's stuff was blocked.
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3rd party firewalls are basically obsolete at this point, with the built-in Windows firewall meeting or exceeding their capabilities from Vista onwards. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Firewall

However, in my opinion, it's a better idea just to eliminate non-trusted 3rd party software from your machine entirely so you don't need to worry about what it's doing. Use fantastic free tools like Process Explorer and Autoruns to find and eliminate such programs. These tools are what the pros use.

Process Explorer in particular can also help you identify and resolve performance problems that interfere with your DAW. You can track down processes and services which are consuming system resources. (IE plugins like Flash are a major culprit, if you're silly enough to run a web browser at the same time you record.) There are lots of articles online (many by Mark Russinovich himself) that explain how to do this type of detective work. Very informative and highly recommended if you want to learn how to do this yourself.
 
#62
Troph said:
3rd party firewalls are basically obsolete at this point, with the built-in Windows firewall meeting or exceeding their capabilities from Vista onwards. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Firewall

However, in my opinion, it's a better idea just to eliminate non-trusted 3rd party software from your machine entirely so you don't need to worry about what it's doing. Use fantastic free tools like Process Explorer and Autoruns to find and eliminate such programs. These tools are what the pros use.

Process Explorer in particular can also help you identify and resolve performance problems that interfere with your DAW. You can track down processes and services which are consuming system resources. (IE plugins like Flash are a major culprit, if you're silly enough to run a web browser at the same time you record.) There are lots of articles online (many by Mark Russinovich himself) that explain how to do this type of detective work. Very informative and highly recommended if you want to learn how to do this yourself.
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I was concerned about those, and when found, I deleted them. I was also concerned about the prior commenter's remarks about programs "Phoning home". This includes a fair amount of MS products. Windows Firewall still allows MS's products to talk to the internet for their "data collection".
 
#63
bassman314 said:
I was concerned about those, and when found, I deleted them. I was also concerned about the prior commenter's remarks about programs "Phoning home". This includes a fair amount of MS products. Windows Firewall still allows MS's products to talk to the internet for their "data collection".
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Microsoft has a very strict privacy policy, and in all cases offers an opt-out setting to prevent any data from being submitted without user consent across all of its software.

Via Control Panel, you can opt out of the following Windows features which collect user data:
- Customer Experience Improvement Program
- Automatic Problem Reporting (sends crash dumps to Microsoft and cross-references the report database to see if an update is available that could solve the problem)
- Windows Update checking

I would not recommend disabling the last one, but altering its polling schedule to fit your usage patterns is fine.

Aside from Windows Update checking and/or installing updates at inopportune moments, I have never had issues with Windows "phoning home". It obviously will send outbound traffic for things like NTP updates and to perform DNS queries, etc. These are normal and certainly not worth blocking.

Other Microsoft software (e.g., Office) will have data collection features specific to that software that can be separately disabled.

If you are really paranoid, you can configure the Windows firewall to have a default rule which blocks outbound packets in general, and yet specifically allows outbound packets for specific listed programs. However, due to the lack of an outbound block notification UI, you wouldn't know when the FW had blocked something until you checked the Windows Event Viewer. Unless you're running a system with a bunch of untrusted software, I have never found this to be necessary.
 
#64
Also, there is a 3rd party add-on called the Windows Firewall Notifier which uses the built-in Windows firewall but provides a UI for blocked outbound connections. (Basically, it just plugs into the system event APIs and displays them in a more user-friendly manner.) However, I still don't recommend blocking all outbound connections by default for the reasons enumerated here.

Frankly, lots of the 3rd party "security" software that pops alerts for every outbound connection is just a scaremongering system designed to make you feel more secure because it "caught" something suspicious! But as 99.999% of such traffic is not malicious and may actually be useful to the system, the fact that it bothers the user 100% of the time makes it more likely that ordinary users will simply freak without justification. :(
 
#66
rocksmoot said:
Troph, that's really good info, thanks! I see you're located in Kirkland, suspiciously close to our friends in Redmond. :) I appreciate your spending time here and the insights you've given.
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Glad to pass along info whenever I can. With respect to my proximity to Redmond, I was indeed a developer on the Windows Base/Core team for roughly 5 years before moving on. Learned a lot of Windows internals during that time, for sure.
 

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