Protecting Your Windows Computer – Free Resources Support

These days, running a computer that's connected to the internet is more likely to end in tears than doing splits naked over a live lobster, especially if you've got broadband. Worms, Trojans, Viruses, script kiddies – there's loads of dangers that can inconvenience you, or even worse – wreck your computer and damage your livelihood. And it's not just protecting your computer from attacks; there's also the problem of protecting your privacy from spy-ware etc.

This free article looks at free programs which help protect against pop-up windows, spyware, tracking cookies, viruses, unauthorised connections to the web and external intrusion attempts.

Virus Scanning

No matter how hard you try, viruses can sneak into your system. Commercial virus-scanners like Norton Anti-Virus will scan every email coming in, going out, and also do a full system search on command or at scheduled intervals, and delete viruses. Personally, I recommend paying the money for a commercial app; it might cost a few dollars, but your professional reputation is worth a lot – and is easily damaged if you start inadvertently sending viruses to clients, and the hours spent cleaning up a compromised system will not be billable to any client!

A freeware anti-virus program that I haven't tried but have heard good reports of is AVG anti-virus which is free to individual home users, with no technical support and without scheduling of tasks, e.g. you have to remember to set it to scan manually. It includes:

• AVG Resident Protection
• AVG e-mail Scanner
• AVG On-Demand Scanner
• Basic Scheduled Tests
• Free Virus Database Updates
• Automatic Update feature
• Easy-To-Use Interface
• Automatic Healing of infected files
• AVG Virus Vault for safe handling of infected files

Any virus scanner is only as good as the virus definitions. Especially if you're on dial-up, you must download the latest definitions; otherwise it won't catch any nasties newer than the last definition file you downloaded!

Privacy Protection

Cookies are a very useful tool in the web developer's trade. At DMXzone, we use them in order to recognise you when you login and to store information on our server about which extensions and premium tutorials you own in order than you can download updates or code whenever you want. Amazon uses cookies to recognise you for their incredibly powerful personalisation suite. (A great article on how to set cookies can be found here).

Some cookies can be used by marketers for example – these are called "tracking cookies" or "data miners". Ah! You might say, cookies can only be read by the domain that served them, so they can't track me across the web. Yes and no, I reply. Many sites serve adverts from 3^rd party sites, which set a cookie (fastclick.com and doubleclick.com are common, and there's others for adult sites). When you go to another site, that uses the same advertising server, it can read the cookies set before and build up a profile of where you go. Doubleclick advertisers can figure out who you are as long as you have ever bought anything online or filled out a form from one of their client sites, which is potentially a privacy invasion.

So for example, you go to www.widget.com which serves an ad from www.snoop-ad.com which sets a cookie. When you later go to www.thingie.com, if it also serves an ad from www.snoop-ad.com, the advertising company knows that you went to both sites, and could report that back to the site owners. Maybe you don't mind; maybe, like me, you don't want people tracking your surfing and purchases.

You can opt-out of doubleclick's cookies here, or spyware scanners will pick them up. Alternatively, just be sure periodically to clear the cookies stored in your browser.