Hi Dave, You up late, or early? I've been up late working and heading to bed on a mo. I've been using Microsoft Essentials now since it was released, and have been very impressed with it. I have it on all our office work stations and out home systems, plus have installed it on many others. Although it's free, and there's the "you get nothing for free lunch" belief, my own feeling is that Microsoft simply cannot afford to screw this software up. Given that your average virus writing idiot does their best to attack Microsoft on any front, I'd imagine Microsoft's shuitters are serioulsy re-inforced here. As regards performance drop off, I can honestly say I've not seen any, and we've got some very old, low spec. hardware around. On the XP Wireless front, I'm not at an XP system right now, but I do recall the function was part of our wireless router software. George. -----Original Message----- From: blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org [mailto:blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] On Behalf Of David Mehler Sent: 03 April 2010 03:50 To: blind-sysadmins Subject: [Blind-sysadmins] two misc questions on programs and accessibility Hello, I've got to protect a new dell that has come out of the dark days of dialup in to the light of high speed cable. I'm not the primary user of it, but i am the primary supporter. I'm using jfw10 currently, but will be moving possibly to something else which is not certain, assume jfw 10 or 11 for now. I'm wondering this is an xpsp3 box btw, wondering the advantages/disadvantages in terms of accessibility, system performance or sluggishness, features, and for the users' ease of use and false positive detection, Windows Defender and Microsoft Security Essentials. I want to protect against viruses, malware, trojans, rootkits, everything. I'd like to know which is better and less of a system resource holder. Unrelated, is there a way in xp to get the signal strength of a wireless connection or what channel it's on? I've heard suggestions of enabling balloon tips, but that didn't do it. Thanks. Dave. _______________________________________________ Blind-sysadmins mailing list Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org http://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-sysadmins