What is some software that I need to purchase and put on my pc at home? Recently I have had a virus destroy my whole computer so I decided to install XP once again and this time load up my computer with plenty of protective software. What would be some of the ideal software I should think about putting on my computer? Thanks.
You need a virus scanner, firewall, and spyware removal software.
I use Norton or McAfee for virus scanners, Zonealarm (free version), Norton Personal Firewall, or Windows XP SP2 Firewall, and spybot for spyware removal.
Mozilla, or Firefox and Thuderbird. Many viruses and worms are caused because IE and Outlook Express are great at spreading them. Using web browsers and email clients will make it that much safer. And, they are free of course.
The best thing you can do is to excersize good judgement when dealing with files of foreign origin, email attachements, etc. Also, get a good software firewall, or hardware firewall (many routers have built in firewalling capabilites) and learn how to use it.
Those are good suggestion so far. I just built a new computer and I went to Download.com and tried out a bunch of new utilities. They have it divided up by category so you can see if you are missing something you want. Some are completely free and some are for a free trial.
That said. I ended up with:
- Webroot Spy Sweeper - primary spy sweeper. I actually have several more because none of them seem complete. Look at the reviews and pick a few.
- Sysgate Personal Firewall (personal free) - the newest version of ZoneAlarm seemed a little clunky to me.
- Avast Antivirus - a good FREE antivirus program. I actually have a new licensed copy of Norton Antivirus but I uninstalled it because it seemed to slow my system down, cause temporary freezes, and just generally annoy the crap out of me.
One of my favorite tools is Asmw PC-Optimizer which is a suite of tools that you can use to do things like speed up your internet connection speed if you have high speed access (I went from 750 kb/s to 1500 kb/s in real use on a cable mode). It can do other things like clean your registry better than any other program I have used.
Two of the suggestions so far have been Thunderbird and Norton AV. I have a cautionary tale to relate about these two not playing nicely together. I was taking a vacation, so I moved my Thunderbird email directory to my notebook computer (which is owned by my employer) to take with me. This notebook has NAV installed, with settings that can’t be changed by me.
As I was downloading email, someone sent me an email worm. This happens frequently, I can just delete those easily. But I got a notification from NAV that a virus had been found in the file “Inbox” and this file had been deleted. Yes, my entire Thunderbird Inbox folder was deleted, with no way to recover it!
I found out that this is a known issue. You have to be sure to set NAV not to real-time scan your Thunderbird directory.
I had this same problem with McAfee and Eudora. McAfee would delete an entire Eudora spool file, sometimes deleting hundreds of messages. I believe the newest Eudora has switched to individual temp files for each incoming message to prevent this. In my experience, the McAfee AV scanner has a number of these undesirable interactions, locking or deleting files used by other applications. It may be possible to use McAfee on a system where real work takes place, but I haven’t found a way and changed AVs. In short, the interactions mentioned by CurtC can happen with other AVs and email apps too so you may have to use some trial and error to find a combination that gets along.