If you don’t want problems with computers, there are actually a few simple and free ways you can go about your computing experience:

1. Get antivirus software, but not anything you have to pay for. I’ve had horrible experiences with the offerings from McAfee and Symantec/Norton. Not only do you have to pay for the software and updates/subscriptions, but there are also headaches as they often install themselves on everywhere in your computer’s file system and are tremendous memory and resource hogs. I highly recommend that you get a freeware virus scanner, my personal favourite being Grisoft’s AVG Antivirus. (http://free.grisoft.com/). There are other ones out there too, including ClamAV, NOD32, among others. All of them have free automatic updates so you don’t have to worry about virus infections.

2. Practice safe computing. If a web site looks fishy, don’t go to it and don’t download anything from it. People will tell you to use Firefox or Flock or whichever other web browser, but Internet Explorer or anything is fine as long as you don’t go to any bad sites. Don’t download suspicious files either, and I highly recommend turning your Internet connection off when you’re not browsing the web or downloading files. If you must download files, don’t use suspicious software programs. Bit torrents are usually your safest bet for movies and music.

3. Get a spyware scanner, or better yet, get multiple. Even if you don’t browse sketchy sites, it’s a good idea to protect yourself from these annoying pieces of software. Many worm writers are now switching to writing spyware and adware because it earns them more money from advertisements shown against your will on your computer, and unfortunately there is not a single product that can completely clean your computer from spyware. Two good free products to deploy are Spybot Search & Destroy and Lavasoft Ad-Aware. Also, beware of pop-up windows that tell you to scan for adware, etc. They usually try to sell you a worse product to “scan for adware” when in fact they install more onto your computer.

To summarize the above, don’t trust anything on the Internet unless it’s from a legitimate source.

These recommendations are pretty much for all Windows users. There are people who will just laugh and tell you to switch to Linux or Mac, but that’s not always the best option for everybody, since many of us need to use certain programs only available for Windows, plus Linux, despite its advances, still present quite the difficulty curve even for Windows power users.

This ClashBang.com article was written by Chris Chu. Tired of privately venting his frustration in vain, Chris decided to share his discontent with the rest of the world.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 16th, 2006 at 2:19 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.