After
a long day of dealing with the stress of the real world, you come
home and are ready to journey into the virtual world through your PC.
The Windows XP screen has finally loaded; you log onto your account,
and get ready to explore the Internet — not ready for the Pandora’s
Box of malware, spam, or hackers and crackers, and overall evil
you’ve unleashed. You can either smash your computer with a
sledgehammer to stop this from happening, or try to fix the problem.
Smashing it is what I’d like to do, but since computers are
expensive, fixing it would be better.
The
first thing you do is turn on the Windows Firewall, which you can
access from the Control Panel. It’s not the best firewall, but it
should suffice for these first few moments. A firewall will prevent
outside users and applications from sneaking onto your computer, and
you can prevent users and applications on your computer from
accessing the Internet. But the Windows firewall isn’t that great
compared to other free firewalls. The free version of Zone Alarm is
a very user-friendly firewall and available from zonelabs.com. Just
make sure to turn off the Windows firewall after you install Zone
Alarm. If you have more than one firewall installed on your
computer, you can cause more problems.
The next piece of software to get is an anti-virus program. This will scan for viruses on both your computer and your email if you use Outlook or Eudora. It’s recommended to have two different anti-virus programs; one program will always find something the other one won’t. Get AVG Free from grisoft.com and Avast Home Edition from avast.com. After you install these programs, you’ll usually have to restart your computer, but don’t do that just yet. Head to windowsupdate.microsoft.com and only download the latest critical updates. The non-critical updates end up being more of a nuisance than a patch. After all the updates are installed, you can restart your computer.
The next piece of software to get is an anti-virus program. This will scan for viruses on both your computer and your email if you use Outlook or Eudora. It’s recommended to have two different anti-virus programs; one program will always find something the other one won’t. Get AVG Free from grisoft.com and Avast Home Edition from avast.com. After you install these programs, you’ll usually have to restart your computer, but don’t do that just yet. Head to windowsupdate.microsoft.com and only download the latest critical updates. The non-critical updates end up being more of a nuisance than a patch. After all the updates are installed, you can restart your computer.