A Fool and his Words are Soon Parted

As most of us are aware, attacks on Windows-based computers are becoming more and more frequent. Away from work, I am regularly asked to help someone “clean up” their Windows PC that has become infested with malware (spyware, trojans, worms, and so on). Interestingly, this type of thing very rarely gets into my systems at home. With this in mind, here are my recommendations for Internet and PC protection software. There may be better options, but these are what I have used for a couple of years now, and recommend to all of my friends.

Web Browser: Mozilla Firefox or Opera

Firefox is again my general purpose web browser. I’m was using Opera, and was impressed with it’s speed, but its behavior is still a bit off, and the array of plug-ins for Firefox is too compelling. As before, the only time I use IE is when I a specific site (like Microsoft.com) requires it.

E-mail: Outlook Express (built-in)

I have looked at other clients, but the built-in mail program seems to work better than most of the rest. I’ll look at Thunderbird (from Mozilla) soon, but for now, I haven’t seen a good reason to do so. I’ve played with the built-in e-mail capabilities of Opera, but it doesn’t provide enough privacy and security (as far as I’ve been able to see) in a multi-user environment.

AntiVirus Software: Avast! Anti Virus

As good as AntiVir (my former free Anti Virus app) is, Avast! is better.

PC Firewall: Zone Alarm

If you are running Windows XP, at the minimum, you should be using the XP Firewall. If you want more control and information than the built-in firewall gives you, download Zone Labs ZoneAlarm. There have been several other good options out there, but they have been bought out by larger companies. ZoneAlarm is free for non-commercial use, and is an excellent first line of defense against applications trying to “call home” from your machine, or to block things that are on the inside of your Internet router/firewall.

RSS Feed Reader: RSS Popper

OK, this isn’t an app that will protect your PC. So sue me. This is just something cool that I think everyone should know about.

If you don’t know about RSS feeds yet, you will soon. Think of it as being the difference between going to the store to buy a magazine every month, and having that magazine delivered to your door. There is no way that I can possibly read all the different web sites that I’m interested in, but getting RSS feeds about them keeps me up-to-date on when a given site has added new pages, and gives me a brief summary of what was added. You can monitor dozens of pages this way.