170 Spoons

Protect Your Computer from Viruses

WHY? When you go online you want to stay safe and not download scary bad things!

I love, love, love to visit my nieces. They are a blast to play with. However, my wife and I have a joke that we should never visit them in February. The reason is because it seems that every time we visit them in the winter, one or both of us will get some sort of sick bug from them. Sure enough I went there last month and guess what I came home with? Yup. Sick.

I don’t want to enforce some sort of ban to visit family that we love, but we don’t want to get sick either. So what do we do? We build up our immune system, wash our hands a lot, and pray their classmates aren’t rubbing their germ-bodies on our nieces!

Going online is like visiting friends and family. We continue to visit and spend time with them because it’s worth our time. Likewise, the Internet is loaded with lots of great things…and a bunch of yuck. So let’s get online safely.

First, hopefully you are now using Firefox as your browser (it’s safer). Most updated browsers now protect from pop-up or pop-under windows. Most of the time though, those are just annoying, not vicious.

Next, you should have at least a couple of free programs installed and run them regularly to fight off both computer viruses and spyware:

1. AVG is a great, free anti-virus program. It’s what I use. I like it because I can set it to download updates every day and automatically scan for viruses. I set mine to get updates at 5 PM and run the scan at 6 PM. Most of the time at those hours I have my computer on but I’m doing something else in the house.
2. Adaware is a great anti-spyware program. The thing I like about this program is that it will swoop in and get rid of any nasties that made it past AVG. I run it just about every weekend. When I open it, the first thing I do is have it go online and get any updates it needs so it can bust the latest spies. Then I run the scan. Usually it takes about 5 minutes or so depending on how thorough I’m scrubbing.

There are also plenty of alternatives freely available and they are good also like SpyWare and Avast. However I’m wanting to give you simple, easy to use solutions that I’ve tested myself. And you can always purchase more professional services like Norton Anti-virus or McAfee Internet Security and I don’t have a problem with those — but I’ll tell you that I don’t use them.

And yes, a Mac can get a virus, just not often!

What tips do you have you can share to protect your computer from catching an internet virus?