What am I talking about you may ask?
What I am getting at is that the author of the MVPS HOSTS file was not, at that time, impressed by what Spybot did, and he seemed to say it was a waste, most likely redundant data added to the end- I forget. In any case, I am doing something new now because of this.
This morning I noticed that the new July version of the MVPS HOSTS file was available. I took a look at my current HOSTS file (the June version) and it was, best I can recall, 597KB in size. I then ran Spybot (update, immunize, and sarch & destroy). My HOSTS file went from 597KB to nearly 1MB, a substantial increase. FYI, the entire HOSTS file is loaded into memory at boot time, so this is a substantial increase which buys one little or nothing.
My new approach is this. When the new monthly MVPS HOSTS file is made available, I will first do a full Spybot run and THEN install the new MVPS HOSTS file. I will thus wind up with a HOSTS file in size of about 600KB vs. one of about 1MB, knowing the larger version would do me little or no good. Capiche? If not, please ask.
HOSTS News (worth bookmarking)
Tom, Yes, totally understand! I had a discussion with you about this awhile back. You have a clever solution to use both facilities. What about this approach - just skip the Immunize step in Spybot?
ReplyDeleteJoan
Joan, unless you know and can tell me, I am not sure of what else IMMUNIZE does, but you ask a good question. I'd have to try it to see if it still appends SOMETHING to the HOSTS file, but even if it does, it's no harm done, just a little more overhead.
ReplyDeleteAlso, this process is a good reminder to me to run Spybot once a month. I find Spybot an invaluable tool on my customers' machines, but usually forget about it on my own machine. It usually runs, as it did yesterday, and at the end I get the Congratulations, no problems were found message.
ReplyDelete