Protect Your Computer from Viruses and Spyware

Now that you have taken the time to pick out a computer that runs as fast as you need it and has lots of memory and plenty of storage space, you will need to take a few steps to keep your computer running as fast as it did on the day that you first fired it up.

There are two things that can really slow your computer to a crawl; viruses and spyware. Let's address these two little buggers separately.

Computer Viruses, Worms and other things that go bump in the night.

Viruses and worms are little programs that are written to cause mischief on your computer. They can be either just an inconvenience or they can wipe out the data that you have collected for years. Nobody writing either of these two types of scripts are doing it to help, but only to hinder. They are typically written by little losers who can't get a date without paying for it, so they take out their frustrations on people who really don't have anything to do with them.

There are many programs on the market that will scan your computer for viruses everyday or whenever you tell it to and remove any viruses or worms that are in its database. Some programs are better than others and some of them are free. Usually the free versions of programs are the last version of the program that cost money before the newest version of the program came out. Since most of the programs that you pay for do not cost more than about 40 bucks, the newest versions are pretty reasonable for what they are accomplishing.

As for the other things that go bump in the night, just tell your spouse to go back to bed and turn out the light. If this is not effective, I recommend ear plugs. They work great at bringing peace and quite. Just remember to take them out when you get out of bed. Wearing them during the day to avoid hearing your spouse can be hazardous to your next night's sleep.

Computer Spyware or Adware

Spyware is a program that runs in the background on your computer to track and record your activities. These are not typically done for malicious reasons like viruses and worms. They are done for nosy reasons. Many companies in a corporate environment run these types of programs to assure that their employees are using the computer for what they are being paid to use it for. Now in this particular setting, the computers belong to the company and they have every right to protect what is theirs.

However, their are also many websites that specialize in target marketing and they will install this type of program on your computer to track where you go on the Internet and you will frequently be "opted in" and start getting bunches of spam. Sometimes this is just done with what is called a tracking cookie, and sometimes it is done with a small program. They will be sent to you in an email or inserted with a cookie when you visit a website. If you watch your status bar when you are loading a site, you will note that frequently the site you are waiting for is not the one you are visiting. These third party sites are the sites that are providing the advertising to the site you are visiting. If you start noticing that your computer seems to be taking a long time getting things done, especially when you are perusing the Internet, you probably have one of these little buggers running in the background.

Firefox™ One measure you can take is to set the preference or option in your browser to only accept cookies from the originating web site if that is an option. In the privacy section of Firefox™ preferences window (Click on the "Edit" menu then "Preferences"), There is a button labeled "Exceptions" next to the "Allow Cookies" check box.

Clicking on the "Exceptions" button opens a window for inputting exceptions to allowing cookies. You can find out what advertising sites are planting cookies on your computer by clicking on the "Show Cookies" button just below the "Exceptions" button. There you will find a list much longer than you might expect. Many of the sites listed will be from a sub domain of ad or ads.something.com. Just type in these domains into the top text box and click on Block, Allow for Session, or Allow to ad the site to the list seen below. There are times that you will want to allow a cookie for at least the session, but you might not want to have the cookie store on your computer indefinitely. These you can set to Allow for Session. You have to allow cookie from some site or you will not be able to do business with them. To be extra secure, you can disallow cookies altogether and input the sites you come across that you want to do business with with an "Allow" status. This of course is the most secure. You will learn of these sites when you attempt to do searches or make purchases. The site will usually deliver a message stating that you must allow cookies if it tries to set one and is unable.

Netscape™ Accomplishing this task is a little different using the settings in Netscape Navigator™. You will find the setting to Netscape™ under the "tools" menu. Scroll all the way down to the bottom where you will find the "Options" option. You will note the "Options" window looks different than previously seen. This was the latest version of Netscape™ available at the time of this writing. It is actually quite a nice browser.

Instead of finding your cookie settings under the "Privacy" button, you will find find the cookie settings under the "Site Controls" options. When you select a site or ad one to the list, you can select "I Trust This Site" or one of the other options. This is just a quick way to check and uncheck groups of the check boxes on the right side of the window. You can also select whichever check boxes you prefer to customize it further. We mentioned on the W3C® page how different browsers use different rendering engines. Netscape has a setting in it to actually permit the user to change which rendering engine is being used for the browser. This will permit you to see a site as it was intended by the developers. So if you come across a site that is developed to give preference to IE™, then you can simply change the setting toward the bottom of this screen titled "Rendering Engine".

There are at least two free programs that I am aware of that you can use to scan your computer for anything that might be running in the background and remove it. The one that I have been using on MS Windows is Ad-Aware SE by Lavasoft. This program will scan your computer for data collecting programs and give you the opportunity to put a stop to them.

Grisoft also provides AVG Free Anti-Spyware which works as well as AVG Free does for virus control.

More Slowdown Fixes

A couple of other things that can greatly slow performance on your computer are an excess of temporary files, cookies, history entries and an unclean registry. CCleaner is available o help you keep things cleaned out. (The first C in CCleaner stand for Crap. No kidding.) You can also use CCleaner to un-install programs that may not provide a means of doing so. When most programs are installed, the program provider will usually provide a program for removing their program. It is just common courtesy. Some program providers do not. Microsoft with Internet Explorer comes to mind. Of course, CCelaner doesn't work on all programs, but it does remove ALL files associated with those it can remove. Even those pesky files the the program provider might leave behind using their un-install programs.

Prevention Is the Best Action to Take

Of course, preventing your computer from being infected in the first place is always the best policy. When you get an email from anyone you do not know, be careful about who sent it to you. In our business, we can't simply delete the email, because it might be from a client. You can take precautions. NEVER click on a link in an email unless you know who sent it to you and even then, typing the address in your address bar is safer than clicking the link.

You can right click the link and view the properties of the link to see if it is anything other than a hyperlink. Hovering over the link and viewing your status bar, will show you where the link will really take you. It is common to get and address such as http://bay.signin.im_a_bad_guy.com. First glance of the link looks like you will be taken to your Ebay sing in page, but looking at the whole address will reveal the true domain you will be whisked off to. Anybody can copy images from the Internet and even have them load from the site who owns them. The page can look just like the sign in page at Ebay, but when you input your login information, it will be capture by "the bad guy" who will simply use it to login to your EBay account later to make whatever changes he wants. This works for bank information, too.

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