I don't use any protection software; in my personal opinion, it's not anywhere near worth the downsides of prompts every 2 minutes and my computer running more slowly than usual. A few simple steps can be followed to keep you virus, worm, Trojan horse, and spy/adware safe.

• Don't open E-mails from people you don't know, especially those with an attachment.
• Don't ever open a file that ends with .exe .dll .bat or .zip unless you specifically downloaded an installation or update. That type of file would almost never use an email to send you the file anyway, it would be an online download.
• Don't visit any sites you know can harm your computer. A simple standard is ‘don't do it if you don't trust it.'

Various insertion methods used to trick you into opening the malicious files are:

• An MSN message saying "Hey, check out my new photos!" and then providing a zip download or link.
•  A crack website telling you to search for cracks or serials, then generating a contaminated EXE file under the name you search, no matter what the search. A search for "checkoutthisfakename for anarticleonviruses" came up with one match, a download for a file named: checkoutthisfakename_for_anarticleonviruses.exe.
• Music or video downloads on Limewire, Kazaa, Morpheus etc. that claim to be something you'd like to listen to or watch that are actually an EXE file that you open, and then have to basically wipe your OS clean in order to remove.

Protecting your PC is easy, it's much better to keep your PC clean than to have to clean it.

Don't open it if you didn't purposefully download it!

1. Make sure that you're protected!

   If you don't have a anti-virus and firewall then you are not protected. Don't count on windows firewall to protect you (even how much Microsoft may tell you). I would suggest that you buy your firewall/anti-virus and that it's from a well known and reliable company such as ZoneAlarm, Norton or Mcaffe. I also suggest SpyBot: Search and Destroy which is very good at getting rid of Spyware and is free.

2. Know your downloads

   If you download something make sure you know what you're downloading. This may sound stupid but sometimes you're not always downloading what you think you're downloading. You never know where a virus might be hiding.

3. Google it

   If you don't know what something is that is on your system or something that you are about to download then search it on Google. The amount times that, by searching something on Google, you save your self form downloading something nasty.

4. Use Mcafee site advisor

   which tells you roughly (with almost 100% accuracy) which sites are safe and which are not. It uses four symbols; a green tick which means it's safe; a red cross which means it's not safe (or certain parts of the site are not "safe"); a question mark which means it hasn't reviewed that site yet; and a exclamation mark which means it's not fully rated so use your own common sense.

5. Check your emails

   If you're sent links or attachments through email, make sure you know the person who has sent the email and exactly what it contains. Even if you know the person who sent the email, be warned that it could still contain unwanted files. Of course don't stop opening attachments or links that friends and family may send you just use caution.

Just remember that although the internet can be a dangerous place that there isn't anything to panic about. As long as you stick to these tips then you should be fine.

Turn off the Welcome Center startup page.

This is as simple as deselecting the Run at Startup check box. You do not need this to run at startup to enjoy Vista.

Change the sleep time on your computer.

If your computer has already gone to sleep please note that tapping a couple of times on the space bar wakes it quicker than moving the mouse. Go to the Windows start button and select Control Panel. It is the 3rd item from the bottom right. Select System and Maintenance green link, then go to Power options and select the blue link Change when the computer sleeps. You will notice they have it set for a measly 30 minutes, way too short for going to get something to eat and drink while you work at home. Set the Turn off display time to something you can live with, say 4 hours (I set mine to never). Set the Put the computer to sleep time to something you can live with. Save changes and exit out of the power options.

Change the defrag disk parameters.

It comes set to defrag every week and this is overkill for most users. I set mine for monthly defrag although on my old XP Professional system I only defragged once a year. Go to the Windows Start button and select Control Panel, the 3rd item from the bottom right. Select the green System and Maintenance link then scroll down to the category called Administrative Tools. Select the blue link Defragment your hard drive and click on the link. It should come up as Run on a Schedule and you can modify schedule. Do so. Select monthly out of how often, day 1 in days and 6pm or another time suited to you. This would mean defrag at 6pm on the first day of the month. Defragging keeps your files tight and together on your hard drive so they load faster. Of course, you could always take it off the schedule and defrag by going to the defrag scheduler when you want to.

Get on the Internet.

Get with your ISP and hook up to the Internet. Hopefully you do not have dial-up as it is much slower than anything else out there. I use my cell phone as a modem and typically run 7-10 times faster than dial-up for $25 a month. If you are stuck with dial-up but have a cell phone see if this option is available to you. After you connect to the Internet, just let your computer sit idle for awhile….Windows will download some updates and notify you to restart when it is done.

Get rid of PC-cillin by Trend and buy Norton Internet Security 2008 for $49.

If you decide to do this, go to the Start button and select Control Panel. Under the green link Programs select the blue link to Uninstall a program. Select Trend software PC-cillin and uninstall it. After it has done its' job close the Control Panel. Have your Internet up and running and put the CD in the CD player to install Norton Internet Security 2008. Once Norton Internet Security 2008 has been installed, change the scan schedule. It comes set to full scan weekly as did disk defrag, this is also overkill as long as you do a quick scan after every days work is done if you were on the Internet. Double click the Norton Icon and select Schedule a scan. The select Schedule a full system scan. Select month for Schedule Task: and then select The 1st Sunday of every month, select time consistent with when you will be on the computer (You might shy away from 6pm or whatever time you set your defrag to, give full system scan a couple of hours prior to defrag. Select OK to save your changes and exit out of Norton.

Burn your music library to Windows Media Player.

Windows Media Player has been completely revamped and it is well done. Once again make sure the Internet is up and running. This will fill in your album information and your song tracks for you. Place the CD you want to copy songs from in the CD player and it should auto start. You will see a tab on the Windows Media Player that says RIP. This is the tab to copy from CD to computer, they call it ripping now. Select the RIP tab. You should see the list of song titles with them all checked. Deselect the songs you do not wish to copy. Select START RIP at the bottom right. Wait for ripping to finish and then you can close Windows Media Player. Repeat this process for each of your CD's you want to copy from. I have 95 songs from 24 CD's in my music library.

Burn a custom CD for your car from Windows Media Player.

You do not need the Internet up and running to do this. Install a blank CD in your CD-W drive. Open Windows Media Player and select a playlist you have made and want to burn from, or select Play All if you do not have a previously made playlist. Select Play, and then View Queue. You can then Edit Queue which will allow you to select a delete box by each song. Delete the songs you do not want burned to your CD, bearing in mind the CD can only hold 80 minutes of audio. Once you have done this, save the playlist under a new name. Use the Window button to return to the main selection screen and select your new playlist. This time select Burn, if you have too much songs selected it will warn you and you can delete some more. If not, it will merrily burn you a music CD with your favorite music on it.

Change your desktop background to your favorite photo.

You do not need the internet up and running for this activity. Your photo must be downloadable from where it is. I have a digital camera with compact flash card, so here is what I do. I have taken a photo of my son and his fiancée, turned off my camera, removed the compact flash media card and inserted it in the appropriate compact flash reader in my 9 in 1 card reader on the front panel of my computer. I then go to Windows start button, select computer, and select the drive with the media in it. I then select the photos I want copied and copy them to the Sample Pictures folder. This is under C:/users/public/public pictures. After doing this, make sure you expand your right task bar and find the safely remove hardware icon and click on it. It should bring up a yellow dialog box telling you it is safe to remove your media card. Do so and click the dialog box. Go back to the Windows start button and select it. Select the Control Panel, 3rd item from bottom right. Go over to the second column and find Appearance and personalization the second from the top. Go to the blue link called Change desktop background and select it. Browse photo locations if not started in Sample Pictures to Public pictures/Sample pictures which is where you should have put your photo when you copied it over. Just click on your picture twice to turn the background to it. Under How should the picture be positioned select the leftmost button. This stretches the picture over your monitor screen. Select OK and close the Control Panel.

Getting the red eye out of your computer photos using Adobe Elements Studio. You need the Internet up and running if this is the first time you've used Adobe Elements Studio. You will patiently wait at most an hour, unless you have dial-up and then it will be even longer, for an update package to load of 193 Mb. Open Adobe Elements Studio and allow the updater to do its thing. Afterwards, click on the camera icon to load Adobe Elements Photoshop 6.0. Select the Edit button. Once the program has loaded, under the menu heading FILE select open. Navigate to Sample Pictures, or wherever you put the photo with red eye at. Double click the photo to load it. A little past mid-way down the left screen side you will see a “red eye”. Select this tool and then position it over your photos red eye and click it. This however, does not remove the entire red eye-it did not on mine. The third icon down on the left side is an eye dropper. Select this tool and then at the top of the icons set sample size to 3 by 3. Using the keyboard hold down the CTRL key and press the "=" key 2 times to enlarge the photo. Move the eyedropper tool over the part of the eye you want the color to be and click one time. Now switch to the brush tool, it is above the paint can icon on the bottom left. Using the eye drop tool this way causes the paint brush to change to that color. Set the paint brush paint size at the top to a small brush. Then just paint over your red eye and your job is complete. Don't forget to go to the file menu and Save your changes. If you were working on your background picture you will need to reload it or restart your computer for it to take effect.

Burn a movie DVD. Once again, if this is the first time you have used Adobe Elements Video shop 4.0 you need to be connected to the internet. Double click the Adobe Elements Studio icon, and then click the camcorder icon in the middle. If this is the first time, let the updater do its job prior to continuing, the wait could be as long as an hour, much longer if you have dial-up. Assuming this is a new project select the new project icon. Name your new project and the film layout studio will load. Click on the left most tool bar item titled Get Media. Click on DVD on the lists that come up. Select GET MEDIA FROM: to be your DVD player where the movie you want to make a copy of is in. Then click the Get Media button at the bottom of the pop up box. It will load the time clips backwards, if you hold the mouse over the first clip it will be VTS_01.03, the second clip will be VTS_01.02 and the third one will be VTS_01.01 if you have 3 scenes.

When you drag and drop them to the time line make sure you drag them in numerical order so you do not play your movie backwards. After you do this you can press play in the center of the screen to make sure your movie plays in the correct order. Then insert a blank DVD of 2 hours total time and select the green share tab at the top left. Click on disk Burn DVD or blue ray disk. Make sure your Burn To: is set to disc. Disc name should be what you want to name the disc, such as Jenna's Wedding. Burner location is the DVD drive you have the blank disc in, either DVD or Blue Ray drive. Select how many copies you want to make. Leave presets alone. On quality, deselect the Fit contents to available space. The Burn button is in the middle right of the screen. This will start encoding the material for you. It takes about 12 minutes to encode 1.5 hours on my system. After that it burns the disc in about 5 minutes, and if you are making more than one copy each copy will take about 5 minutes. That is all there is to it.

Well that is easy, you have viruses, worms, and spyware, eating away at your system, stealing your music files and sending them to nerdy little felons who nonetheless, have your possessions then you will ever get. But don't worry about them, as soon as you realize that your money is being spent in Taiwan to buy a new Neko doll, all of your bothering about your computer will be far from your mind. But wait, once again it is the evil of your computer that has lead to this theft of your identity.

All of this pretty much sucks haa?

Well have no fear, with a little money, Norton Antivirus can save the day,

But what if your sitting there saying to yourself “I don't have any money.”

Once again, there is a solution PC Tools Antivirus Free Edition™ 3.6, which is my personal pick, along with Ad-Aware SE Personal, also free, and full scans of your computer every week or so, you'll do just fine.

And don't forget to defrag your computer once a month to keep it running smoothly, but be warned, when scanning or defragging, leave your computer alone, it works faster and more effectively. Also, the first time you defrag your computer, which is preferably after you've downloaded and run the program you selected, it can take from a few minutes, to a few days. Yikes.

Many people say its Kaspersky, others say its NOD32 and someone thinks it's Norton or Panda. And they always try to prove it!

Well, people choose anti-virus which they like and which is best for them. I use Avast Home Edition, because it doesn't slow my PC very much. When I'm doing full system scan I install Kaspersky because this anti-virus is the best fighter against viruses for me. I don't use it all the time because it slows my computer too much.

How anti-viruses slow down the computer

2.2 GB data was transferred from one disk into other without installed anti-virus. Transfer took 6 min. 04 s. Later transfer was made with anti-viruses installed. Transfer was longer:

• Avast Home Edition - 29 s.
• AVG Free Edition 7.5 - 51 s.
• Panda Antivirus 2007 - 1 min. 6 s.
• NOD32 - 1 min. 21 s.
• Antivir Personal Premium - 1 min. 58 s.
• Antivir Personal Classic - 2 min. 29 s.
• Kaspersky Anti-Virus 6.0 - 2 min. 44 s.
• AVG Pro Edition 7.5 - 3 min. 9 s.
• Norton Antivirus 2007 - 3 min. 50 s.
• Bitdefender v10 - 6 min. 18 s.
• Bitdefender 8 Free Edition - 6 min. 18 s.
• F-Secure Antivirus 2007 - 18 min.

Virus Database

For an anti-virus is very important to detect new viruses, that's why they always update their virus database. How long it took to find out about a new virus?

• Kaspersky Anti-Virus 6.0 - 28 min.
• F-Secure Antivirus 2007 - 2 h. 55 min.
• Bitdefender v10 - 2 h. 59 s.
• Bitdefender 8 Free Edition - 2 h. 59 s.
• Antivir Personal Premium - 3 h. 15 min.
• Antivir Personal Classic - 3 h. 15 min.
• NOD32 - 4 h. 46 min.
• Panda Antivirus 2007 - 6 h. 34 min.
• Avast Home Edition - 7 h. 31 min.
• AVG Pro Edition 7.5 - 8 h. 46 min.
• AVG Free Edition 7.5 - 8 h. 46 min.
• Norton Antivirus 2007 - 12 h. 41 min.

Kaspersky Anti-Virus 6.0

“Kaspersky” is one of the best anti-viruses around. It detects all most popular and most rare viruses. It also doesn't damage any “Office” documents. But on the other hand, this anti-virus is bad against spyware. It detects only about 75% of them.

Note: Kaspersky 7 will come out soon. It will be much better than Kaspersky 6. You can already try out beta version.

F-Secure Anti-Virus 2007

All viruses, Trojan Horses and “rootkits” were unable to hide from this anti-virus. But F-Secure still can't detect all spyware. It also needs about 150 MB free space. It is too much for an anti-virus.

Antivir Personal Premium 7.0

This is one of the best anti-viruses against spyware, Trojans and other viruses. It also has a very important function - auto e-mail scan. But on the other hand, it can't find all “rootkits”.

Bitdefender v10

“Bitdefender” offers good protection against viruses and scan's computer more carefully than other anti-viruses, that's why “Bitdefender's” full system scan is slow. It detects spyware perfectly, but viruses can turn off or even damage this anti-virus.

Antivir Personal Classic 7.0

This is definitely the best free anti-virus. It finds more viruses than other free anti-viruses. It is also easy to use this program, but if you have this anti-virus, get an anti-spyware. “Antivir Personal Classic 7.0” can't find them all. Only about 16% of them detected.

Panda Antivirus 2007

“Panda Antivirus 2007” is one of the best against most popular viruses, but if our computer will be attacked by a rare virus, we won't get all the help. It isn't good against “rootkits” or Trojans too. But “Panda” doesn't need much time to perform full system scan.

Norton Antivirus 2007

Long ago this was one of the best anti-viruses, but now, it is one of the worst. That's because “Norton” find's out about a new virus only after about 13 h. That is very bad indeed. It also needs 200 MB free space! Well, at least we won't see spyware in our PC.

Note: If you have a Chinese version of “Norton Anti-Virus”, GET RID OF IT! There was a bug found, which deletes some very important “Windows” files.

Avast 4.7 Home Edition

Avast isn't introduced to many Trojans or “rootkits”. Some viruses can turn off this anti-virus. So if you want to have a good and free anti-virus, get Avira Personal Classic. Well, at least Avast doesn't slow down PC too much.

AVG Pro Edition 7.5

Most popular viruses won't stand a chance, but Trojans or “rootkits” have a chance. A very bad thing is that AVG doesn't protect “Outlook Express” or “Tunderbird” e-mail.

AVG Free Edition 7.5

Free AVG version can kill popular viruses, but many of “backdoor” viruses and Trojan Horses weren't stopped. AVG Free isn't good against spyware (unlike the commercial version) and has detected about 12% of all “rootkits”.

NOD32

Popular viruses were destroyed (all were detected), but rare have successfully harmed our PC (only about 85% detected). “NOD32” didn't detect viruses, which were in a CD/DVD or USB flash drive.

Bitdefender 8 Free Edition

Don't ever install this anti-virus in your PC! It has detected only 50% of the most popular viruses! Rare ones and “backdoor” viruses didn't have a chance though. If you are using “Internet Explorer”, Bitdefender 8 Free will protect it perfectly.