temo:
> I would be glad to hear from playBunny and bitwisexor how they imagine safe system on Windows (XP or others) not Unix systems,

I'm not sure theres such a thing as a safe system. With Windows? A contradiction, surely ;)

Hmm... would QEMU on Windows runnning OpenBSD guest count? ;) I think that would proboably be considered cheating...

> so what application to use to protect agains worms, hacking attacts, viruses and other network threats.

Yes, well one of my points is using an application to defend against threats is the wrong approach; it's (sometimes) preventing the symptoms (exploits) rather than the cause (buggy software).

This is somewhat comparable to the view that quick patches makes the software somehow "more secure". If anything, after a few patches are released to fix security vulnerabilities I lose confidence.

If I had to (which unfortunately I have had to on a few occasionas) 'secure' a Windows box then I'd start by disabling all the unneeded (and theres a lot of that!) junk on it - which Microsoft seems to have intentionally made a harder task.

As you mentioned, don't use admin rights: in fact, I'd proboably suggest using a seperate user for tasks that involve untrusted data (something that should proboably done even on *nix).

As for not viewing "\"suspicous\"" web pages and not to open e-mail from "\"unkown\"" senders, that is - sadly - excellent advice. I say sadly because it shouldn't need to be done.

The problem with that advice is that of course it limits what you can do - indeed, I will often intentionally view (and dissect) "\"suspicious\"" things; something that admittedly, most people don't do (and as I use *nix it's not really a problem, but my point is that it limits what can be done).

Theres not really much else that can be done; maybye virus checkers will help but I have little experience in that area.

I wonder why people use Windows anymore. Perhaps I could understand why it was used, but - as much as I despise them (I take an elitist view to computing) - desktop Linux have made a lot of advancements and are not, I think, any harder to use than Windows; and at least they're less likely to have a mind of their own that's so evil.

P.S. I doubt theres anything you can do to defend from "hacking attacks" (attacks?); but I wouldn't worry, they won't do any harm. Or did you mean cracking? ;)

P.S. #2: Recently Microsoft seems to have been trying to make their software more secure; they have made some good decisions, but so far it doesn't seem to have worked.