First, a review of firewall logs show continuous attempts to get in – no firewall and you will probably have your computer compromised quite quickly. There have been enough documented demonstrations of this I have read from respected sources to be confident in this assertion.

Second, there have been any number of well publicized, recent incidents where advertising company servers were hacked, resulting in thousands of visitors to well-known public sites ending up with trojans installed on their computers.

Next, even if we do not routinely engage in risky behavior, at one point or another, there is at least a chance that we’ll get deceived and get caught – which is why I routinely run my OS partition in virtual mode on my home computer.

Lastly, there has been a significant change in the nature of the attacks – data destruction is no longer the only object of the game. Now, it’s increasingly about the accrual of information and bot computers – which is done as non-obtrusively as is possible.

In the face of all this, I believe that a decision to do without anti-malware protection is not one I can agree with.

viruses seep in the system eventually, a good way to find and delete these is avg free.grisoft.com/ a free anti virue anti spyware anti rootkit site, so if you are unprotected go get protection.

and for the love of god unless you hav a 300-500 GB hardrive(HDD) do not install notan anti-virus it slows you down.

in a bit

Superantispyware: there’s a good free version and Chris has a discount for it.
AVG: there’s a free version at free.grisoft.com
Spybot S&D: of course this one is great.
A good for-pay antivirus is Nod32.
CCleaner: i recommend this because it can clear your temporary files (where spyware hangs out a lot)

However, through all this, the most important thing is behavior. Don’t open email attachments you don’t know, don’t click strange email links, don’t go to bad sites and install video players, don’t install strange toolbars, don’t use untrusted P2P sites…the list goes on.

After all this, you should be pretty good.
Thanks, laaabaseball

Anti-Spyware: Anti-Keylogger(www.anti-keyloggers.com) as permanent protection and Ad-Aware(www.lavasoftusa.com/) for scanning

Anti-Virus: NOD32(www.eset.com)

Thos should be enough to protect the PC while surfing the web.

Delete Windows and you need no more of this crap.

I actually prefer Linux to Mac OS because I don’t want any company to decide for me what I can or can’t do. But some people prefer Macs due to their simplicity and I can’t blame them for that…
Unfortunately, if Apple would become next Microsoft, same thing would happen to Mac.

With Linux, however, it’s completely different story, since everyone could issue a patch and if more and more people will use Linux, more supporters and developers could issue the patches, including many companies that will want to advertise their competence to customers by doing something productive and having everyone be grateful to them.

Now you know what people would use if we lived in a perfect world. Make it happen!

-Opera and a hardware router combined with safe browsing habits
-Adaware and Spybot for spyware/trojan/adware scans
-AVG anti-virus
-XP SP2 firewall
-Ccleaner for disk cleanup
-Diskeeper pro for defragmenting my drives. Excellent defragger.
-regular updates for all important software, especially MS critical updates.
-regular backups to dvd of all important files.

Works brilliantly.

I remember a couple of months ago i was having a conversation with a couple of managers, one was the IT manager, here in the office and I mentioned I didn’t use any of those programs at home. They were both shocked beyond belief. They insisted my computer must be riddled with all sorts of baddies, and had a hard time believing it wasn’t. Finally I stopped trying to convince them and steered the conversation back to work-related matters.

After saying all of that, I now use Avast for my anti-virus scanner. Last year I traveled to China and got married to a wonderful woman. The thing is, she is in the habit of downloading, shall we say “questionable”, software from various Chinese web sites. It wasn’t long before my computer was infected with the first virus it had had in years.

She felt very bad that she had infected my computer, and she doesn’t visit those web sites any more. She also now uses Firefox and that helps a lot too.