sorry to say this but you are about to be hit by the TAW monster

you would defintly get a better answer if you post this in the hardware forum. But to help you out I asked my internet provider ( cable) and they stated that on the router you should see a button that states on/off. if it is off there is no internet connection. I acully busted my first one because I undid the cable going from outside to the router, what can I say I'm a bit paranoid lol.

Blessed Be to all those that still dream of the flight to the stars.

quote " You wouldn't like my Happy Place it is full of blood, carnage, and destruction" :ME

Well, the main question is how vulnerable a booting computer is?
My laptop takes about 5 minutes to boot up (albeit the Anti-vir comes online about tenth of about 42 startup processes), and druing that time, its pointless to try and do ANYTHING. The startup is eating up so much CPU cycles and memory that it takes anything else five times normal to initialise.

Unfortunatly, with anything DSL upwards, the connection/authentication/syncronisation process is done completely in the modem, so, no, there isnt any way to manage the connection from the computer itself.
however, if you have the spare cash lying around, you might be able to get a hardware firewall and hook that up between the modem and your computer. Typically, those will beat an ADSL modem to boot.
Excessivley, im hiding behid 3 firewalls (2 hardware: Modem and Wireless Router, and 1 Software: TM Pc-cillin). My advice would be to see if the modem itself has any sort of firewall, and turn that on. It may take a bit of time to get it set up properly, but usually it works fine.

And, if you are REALLY paranoid, almost every modem or managed router i have come across has a 'DMZ' setting that will forward all external requests to a specific address. just point the destination to a null address, and you're pretty much invisible.

Some firewalls will provide "boot time" protection, but the easiest thing is to do what I do; simply unplug the power cable whenever you are not using the modem .

moved because this is def a tech question.

do not be troubled by your apparent problem, many (most) AV progs are the last to load in the Windows booting sequence, however you'll note that in the UPnP framework of XP that the internet connection is established to the o/s after the AV is enabled, hence why it won't update until that connection is established. Don't feet, you're not unprotected. I've been puzzled by the same issue in the past, you aren't on your own. But it isn't really a problem, unless the AV applet is indicating it has errors or won't load certain dlls etc.

XP Service Pack 2 sets the firewall to come on earlier in the boot sequence, if you enable the firewall in the first place. Dunno if that helps.

thx for moving the topic (I am from the old times, we sued to ask everything in OT)

yea, I noticed that it connects right after AV boots up, phew thats good. Well as allways, thx for the help Taw

heh as for SP2, I dont think I will be instaling it, I remember an old topic that says certain MP games are rendered useless. It might provide more safety, but at what cost?

surely that's just a case of opening up the port for that game? I'm a little disappointed that SP2 doesn't have an autoscan function to let you find the internet-able apps you want to enable, like the games n stuff; but it normally tells you when ones trying to access the interweb. still any firewalls better than none and its easy enough to use.

I'm not exactly sure what kind of QoS you have or how your provider operates (since you didn't tell us), but I'm pretty sure that you are behind a hardware firewall on the other end of your cable connection. Most probably you're NAT'ed and most probably it's NAT 1:1 (taw should know what I'm talking about)...
Bottom line is: no non-requested incoming connections are possible because of the nature of cable internet access. Besides, most AV apps run as a service rather than a simple app, and are started along with other services even before win explorer shell starts up.
You're in no danger, so relax and enjoy your new and improved internet leeching abilities


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Careful what you wish for... You just might get it.
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