How to Protect Your Computer from Malicious Attack for Free.

Some ISPs boast they have virus scanning and spy bot removal tools. However these were always available to you free of charge on the net. The following is what we use and recommend. We spend much technical support time supporting other vendors products i.e. Norton, McAfee these are giant programs that take over your computer. They alter your email settings causing your email to stop working. Norton often times corrupts the winsock in XP when you try to uninstall it. I personally have had to repair many computers damaged by Norton. The following recommendations are superior products to those offered by other ISPs in my opinion.

Microsoft made a lot of mistakes and has left many holes in their XP operating system. These holes are exploited by worms which crawl around the net looking for un upgraded computers. To get your computer secure you must first get the patches to patch Microsoft's errors. To do this click open Internet Explorer while online and click on Tools then Windows Update. Recently we have tried to reload operating systems without Service pack II . Basically the software no longer works as we were hit with the sasser virus within a matter of seconds. If your machine doesn't have Service Pack II make sure you install it prior to accessing the web. Or you will see a warning your computer will be shutting down in 30 seconds. This means you have already contracted the virus.



Next you may have to download something to scan your computer if you have been here before you will see a window like this.

Click on Express Install when download is complete you will probably have to restart your computer.

Ok after restart you might want to repeat the process above to make sure your system is up2date.

You can also set preferences to do this automatically in future.

There are 2 more things which need to be done to insure you are protected. You will need a virus scanner. AVG is great it's free I have scanned computers with Norton and been clean and then rescanned with AVG and found viruses embeded in zip files. To get your free copy of AVG go here.

AVG Free Virus Scanner  this is the latest as of 03/2007

At the bottom of the page you will see this click on the file and download.



Choose run to install when it's done installing you will again need to restart your computer.

Viruses are created all the time so it is important to get the new virus definitions on a regular basis.

In Windows go to Start / All Programs / AVG Free Edition / AVG Control Center the console opens up.




Click on Check for Updates. It will download all the new virus definitions so brand new viruses that are on the net will be recognized.

Now Click on Test Center You should see the following window and click Scan Computer this may take quite a while so let it run without stopping you will get a report back about what it found and you can delete the viruses or move to quarantine your choice.



The next program also free you need to get. We have seen more computers paralyzed by spyware and ad bots these days. As you surf the net you pick these spybots up and they report back to their writers. Usually they report back web surfing habits to form demographics for sales research. There are so many hidden processes running on machine's these days that there is no memory left to run the things you need. Ad Aware is outstanding to remove these bots you will surprised at how many bots ad aware will find.

Ad Aware link updated 03/2007 to latest version of the free software.

Zone Alarm Free Firewall Zone alarm can be a bit tricky to use however it is a free firewall we use it here and it performs pretty well. Basically it keeps worms from coming in the thousands of ports your computer has. It asks you questions about programs trying to access the Internet and things on the internet trying to access your computer. You respond yes or no, and it remembers your answers thereby allowing or denying the program to reach the Internet or your computer A firewall is a must for any computer that you want to keep healthy below is a link to this free software. Remember a firewall blocks and sometimes problems arise when it blocks too much. We have seen people unable to send e-mail because there firewall is blocking your computers ability to send e-mail. A simple right click on the ZA icon by your clock on the task bar and you can shut down Zone Alarm. You can also reset it to the original defaults if you mess up the settings.

Zone Alarm Is a firewall that is free that you can install. There is also the windows firewall on the XP operating system. These is fairly easy to utilize but you will be prompted with questions whether to block or allow certain programs trying to access the Internet. Be careful as answering incorrectly can permanently block a needed program.