General Advice on Protecting Your PC

[jackcford]

How you protect your PC can be a very personal thing, what is important is that you do. There is nothing worse than switching it on to find it is infected or even worse not finding infections that are there.

The following recommendations are just that as there is no connection between Tradewind and the suggested solutions other than most of us use them very successfully, nor can we accept any responsibility for their use. The other good thing is that they are all free

Avast! 4 Home Edition - Free antivirus
Exactly what it says - protects your PC, email and website access amongst other things

http://www.avast.com/eng/avast_4_home.html

Ad-Aware SE Personal
is a tool freely available for personal use on Windows platform machines. It can scan your computer for stealthy spyware programs and help you to determine what they are doing and whether they are a threat to your system. At the push of a button, Ad-Aware will delete these insidious programs from your PC

http://lavasoft.element5.com/software/adaware/

Spybot - Search & Destroy
can detect and remove spyware of different kinds from your computer. Spybot S&D is exceptionallu popular and very effective. It can be used in conjunction with a program like Ad-Aware because they will often catch a handful of spyware that the other did not detect.

http://www.safer-networking.org/en/download/index.html

SpywareBlaster
Rather than detecting and removing spyware after the fact, SpywareBlaster proactively protects your system to block spyware and adware from infiltrating in the first place.

http://www.javacoolsoftware.com/spywareblaster.html

Shields Up!
Internet vulnerability profiling -
Without your knowledge or explicit permission, the Windows networking technology which connects your computer to the Internet may be offering some or all of your computer's data to the entire world at this very moment! Use the various services to check for ways into your PC

https://www.grc.com/x/ne.dll?bh0bkyd2

All of these programs can only help with your PC security ... protect away!