Do you use THESE six simple things to keep your Windows PC up and running?

It just occurred to me that I haven’t had a virus or a security breach on my computer for quite some time so I thought I might share my experience as to how I’ve achieved this.

1. Keep my Windows XP system updated – I have set up the auto update feature of the operating system, yet I never allow it to install anything automatically – just have a look at what has been downloaded and say no to a new video driver, for example. Use some common sense and patch your system up.
2. Never, ever use Internet Explorer. Use anything else – Firefox, Opera – the choice is yours, anything is going to get the job done better than IE. There’s only one reason I pull it up on my computer – when I want to manually check for any newly released patch out there on the site of MS. BTW, they (finally!) released the new Internet Explorer 7 and I played around with it for a while. It just doesn’t bring anything new to the market. Nothing, that hasn’t been there for a while. Besides, I still don’t trust them. My choice? I’ll stick to Opera.
3. Set up and use a good firewall program. Since these are my ways to keep my computer up and running, my choice is ZoneAlarm – the basic free version will be enough.
4. Install a good antivirus program and keep it updated automatically. Again, my choice for the last 18 months has been Avast – free is good enough for me. Avast
5. Install Spybot Search&Destroy and AdAware SE Personal. Both are anti-spyware proggies, both are free, and yes, I run both of them every now and then to make sure there’s nothing rotten on my pc.
6. Back it up! Repeat, back it up! Use a program that creates an image of your whole hard disk drive and then just add incremental changes to that image – use an external hard disk drive, a DVD, whatever, just do it. And do it regularly. My choice is Acronis True Image.

21 October 2006 | Internet, Security, Life with Technology, Computers and Notebooks, Software | Comments