Viruses, Hackers, Trojans all rely on people not being scrupuluous about their (Windows, by and large) PC’s health. It is simple, free and will take 2 hours to set up then 1 hour weekly to maintain and secure your PC.

No excuse is good enough. It is not the infected PC’s health that matters, it is that the PC owner’s friends suffer. They are bombarded with viruses, scam attacks, phishing and all other nasties and all because a lazy PC owner does not think or act.

Do this:

You must complete all steps before using the computer or the internet for anything else:

1/ download:

Sygate Free Firewall. Damn Good Product.

Adaware SE Personal Free Anti-Advertising, Tracking, Spyware.

antivir Free Antivirus by H+BEDV Datentechnik GmBH. Top-Notch. Regularly updated, German technology.

Spybot - Search & Destry Another anti-spyware, anti-trojan, antihacker software and a diamond product like Adaware - Two is better than one - in this area only.

2/ Disconnect from the internet. Only reconnect when an installation asks to update andthen use for no other purpose until all scans, including double-Spybot s&d if needed in step 7, are complete.

3/ Uninstall your existing antivirus & firewall and turn off windows XP firewall.

4/ Reboot.

5/ Install Antivir. Let it run through, including full scan. Check out program options, get familiar: it is your new antivirus: It is free, regularly updated and works really well.

6/ Install Sygate, your new really excellent free firewall.

Sygate Tutorial: Skip if you’re a natural.

Normally Sygate will silently protect you, in the background mostly, letting you know if anything really bad starts to happen and asking if you want certain things to happen from time to time.

Sygate will tell you when an update is available. Install it.

6/ Install and run Adaware SE Personal. This program defeats advertising software, tracking software, dataminers, trojans, cookies - allsorts of nasties. Update it and run it once a week. When you run the scan for the first time it will come up with a lot of nasties. Don’t worry. Just right click any item in the list, chose “select all” from the list by left clicking on it, then delete them all. Do the same on your weekly scan, you want none of it.

7/ Install and run Spybot s&d. It does much the same as adaware - Both run once a week keeps you really safe. Do the same in all respects as with Adaware: Update and run once a week; Delete everything it comes up with. The first time and other scans it might at the end say it could not fix all problems: Say Yes when it asks to run at boot-up/startup. Then, when finished running, reboot/restart the computer and it will run immediately - run through and fix all.

There is a tab in the program where you can immunize the system and silently protect against bad programs and pages - click yes for all the options you can find here for the best protection. And Don’t worry if SpyBot reports a DSO Exploit and fails to fix it. Its a small bug with no consequence - ignore it.

8/ Connect to the net, connect to Windows Update and install updates. If you never did this it can take a while, especially on a slow connection and might require one or ttwo reboots - don’t bother if yours is an illegal windows XP, it won’t work, and anything pre windows-98 is history.

Don’t forget. Update and run Antivir, Adaware & Spybot once a week. You’ll be safe as houses my friend. Once a month do windows update as well, you’ll be safer than most people you know.