Check out lots of Room Rates

[External Poster]

This posting is from: Denise C
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If you want to check alot of different hotels at the same time to
compare prices at the same time. Check out Travelaxe. It checks out the
other travel sites and compares all the prices and highlights the lowest
for all the hotels that it finds.

For Las Vegas it searchs 13 other travel sites and compares prices for
over 115 Hotels! Be patient, it takes awhile! My advice is after you
find a place that interests you, be sure to check their website or
directly as you may still get a lower price!

Check it out at: www.travelaxe.com

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(This posting was entered by Denise C, an external user of MyDLV.)

[External Poster]

This posting is from: annie
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> Check out Travelaxe. It checks out the

Just one caveat on the above. This is a closed-source Windows application
and you don't really know what it's doing on your PC. There's been some
speculation on the newsfroups that it may, uh, "phone home" on occasion.

No proof one way or another, but ...

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(This posting was entered by annie, an external user of MyDLV.)

[External Poster]

This posting is from: Denise C
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So for I have not seen any evidence that Travelaxe "phones home". I use
a couple of programs to control other programs from unauthorized access
to the internet. One is Zone Alarm, a FREE software firewall program,
that only allows programs access to the internet when I OK it. The other
is SpyBot-Searh & Destroy, which search my system for spyware and
adaware programs and removes them. Travelaxe has not shown up as
containing any.

Well that's what I know!

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(This posting was entered by Denise C, an external user of MyDLV.)

[External Poster]

This posting is from: Denise McCracken
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I'm still in the process of resysgening my home PC because of a worm
that got into it through Windows Update, and I agree with Annie's
caveat, especially for people who are running Microsoft operating
systems. Some people seem to have nothing better to do than exploit its
many security holes. The days of running a simple virus scanner over an
executable and considering it "safe to run" are gone.

I run a tape and/or CD backup of the stuff that I want to save, and I
have the CDs of all of the programs and drivers that have to be reloaded
in an envelope. I gave up using Pegasus for email because I couldn't
find a way to disable the preview pane, which can load virii even if you
don't open the message. I disabled Microsoft's automatic update
utility.

Spybot finds a lot of stuff on my PC, but no vendor can make a program
that finds everything. Have you ever done a "netstat -a" from a DOS
window and seen all of the stuff that's connected? If you've been on
the web for a while, it can be mind-boggling.

For instance, my HP printer driver communicates continuously with HP
with two connections. Why? Is it searching for updated drivers, or
sending cookies to HP so that they can track my web activity and sell it
to spammers? Could a PO'd employee at HP use the service to send a worm
to my machine? I don't know. It's a shared printer, and I could
understand seeing connections on my LAN, but why does it talk on the
Internet?

Really, the best way you can be safe is to disable every service that
you don't need (Windows update is one), maintain the highest security
level on your browser that still lets you do what you need to do, and
don't run any application unless you know you can trust it.

And don't ever put anything important on a computer!!!

Run a rotating backup set with replacement. If a virus gets into your
machine and you're only rotating a week or two, or using the same tape
for every backup, you will end up with a tape that still has a virus on
it. Or, you will find that your one tape is unreadable and goodbye,
data. I just had that happen at a commercial site...disk failure with
one unreadable backup. Getting their data back was tricky. Getting it
back from a Windows box probably would have been impossible.

-densie

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(This posting was entered by Denise McCracken, an external user of MyDLV.)