How to Protect Your Computer
Never open e-mail attachments, unless it's one you're expecting from yourself or someone you know. Many viruses access user's address books and send themselves to the first fifty or more names on the list. Because you think it's from a friend, you innocently open the attachment and that's when the wackiness ensues.
In some cases, the virus may block your access to the Internet, disable your anti-virus program and alter key system files—in short, it is a ghastly mess.
If you do receive an e-mail with an attachment from a friend and you're not sure, don't do anything until you speak with them. This remains the most common way for viruses to enter computer systems, even computers with up-to-date virus protection.
Keep your anti-virus signatures up-to-date. Modern anti-virus programs, such as the Norton or McAfee products, update themselves automatically; because they only reach out to their respective secure servers, this is the most basic way to protect your computer from viruses.
Run a complete virus scan once a week—scan your entire hard drive, or drives. For larger drives, or drives containing a lot of data, this can take over an hour. You can run it while you work, but you will see and feel a performance hit—your computer will take longer to respond to your commands because the virus scan is very disk-intensive.
One strategy we use is to start it before we go to bed, let it run all night if it wants—you can combine this with other maintenance chores, such as defragmenting your hard drive or running an anti-spyware program.
Use a firewall, either hardware or software—this protects you from a whole other class of viruses—Trojans. Some of these can sit on your hard drive until activated from afar, or by a calendar date or any number of other triggers. They have the power, like regular viruses, to truly damage your system, deleting files and folders or system files, preventing your computer from even booting.
Use anti-adware/spyware software at least once a week —most of this softwareis free—Spybot: Search & Destroy is our favorite, though users have reported good results with AdAware as well. Adware & spyware will accumulate on your hard drive even with all of the securlty precautions above.
Stay away from peer-to-peer software sharing programs— "free" programs like KaZaa include adware as the price you pay. Their EULAs (End User License Agreement), which you agreed to when you loaded it, allow them to use your computer as an ad server to other users on the Internet, using your valuable resources—which you pay for—to annoy other users.
Updated: November 18, 2005