How to Keep your Computer Running
Quickly & Securely

Table of Contents

Anti-Virus Software

A firewall will protect your PC from internet attackers and prevent rogue programs from accessing your internet connection without your permission. Anti-virus software will protect you from malicious programs that have made it onto your PC – for instance, opening infected email attachments or running programs from an infected CD/floppy disk.

Technically, there are three main types of malicious programs – viruses, worms and Trojan Horses. If you want to find out more about the differences between the types, we recommend you visit www.webopedia.com/DidYouKnow/Internet/2004/virus.aspand http://computer.howstuffworks.com/virus.htm.

One of the most popular free anti-virus programs available is AVG Anti-Virus which can be downloaded at http://free.grisoft.com. The free version has limited functionality but, like the firewall versions mentioned above, there is a professional version with more advanced features included. (Visit www.grisoft.com to find out more.)

The makers of the eScan suite of products, MicroWorld, also have a free anti-virus toolkit utility which can be found at www.mwti.net. (Click the Free Virus Scanner link on the left side of the page.)

The makers of the ZoneAlarm firewall program mentioned previously also have a standalone anti-virus program called ZoneAlarm Antivirus.

Of course, there are many other anti-virus applications on the market. Here are some of the more popular ones:
Norton AntiVirus
McAfee VirusScan
Trend Micro PC-cillin
Kaspersky Anti-Virus
BitDefender
eScan Virus Control

You can find even more anti-virus protection by visiting www.download.com.

Aside from anti-virus software, you should also follow the guidelines below to prevent your PC from getting infected:

• Don’t open email attachments from people you don’t know or trust.
• Be very careful when running programs from unknown sources. There are programs on the internet with hidden malicious code in them.
• If you use Microsoft Office, don’t allow macros (code within Office documents like Excel and Word) to run unless you know they’re necessary and safe. To protect your PC from macros in Excel 2003, click on Tools/Options then select the Security Tab and the Macro Security button. The security setting should be High but if you want to be able to choose which macros to run, select Medium. You can find out how to prevent other unwanted macros from running by checking their help files.
• Never run executable email attachments from unknown sources. Files like Word documents (.doc), spreadsheets (.xls) and images (.gif and .jpg) are data files and cannot damage your PC (so long as you also protect yourself from macros as mentioned above). However, files with the extensions .exe, .com and .vbs can all contain potentially unsafe code.

What are the most important things to remember with anti-virus software?
1) Make sure it is always up to date. (All good anti-virus programs can be configured to automatically update themselves.)

2) Always have it running. Your anti-virus protection should be running in the background at all times to ensure that your PC has the best chance of spotting & blocking a virus as soon as your PC is exposed to it.

3) Scan regularly. Make sure that your anti-virus is setup to perform an automatic system scan regularly and/or you perform a manual virus scan regularly.

Now that you’ve got a firewall and anti-virus software working to protect your computer, there’s one more form of protection you should have – Anti-Spy/Adware.