Students who take courses over the Internet using their home PC need to have a reliable PC to ensure assignments are completed on time. To that end, it's importance to protect
your PC from any threats or problems that could impact course work. Prevention is the best medicine, and the links below will provide tools that can serve as a first-line of defense to ensure your PC is up and running when you need it the most, for example, during an on-line quiz.
Remember this, software alone will not protect your PC 100%. You need to be careful of the sites you visit and what you download. For example, be suspicious of screen savers because they can in themselves be viruses. Also,
be careful of email attachments. Do not open up any email attachment unless you know who had sent it.
First and foremost, you need good virus protection. You don't need to pay a lot of money to purchase virus protection because free virus protection is available. I use AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition:
http://www.grisoft.com/.
This software is as good, or even better as far I'm concerned, as Norton's or McAfee. There is no risk.
Windows XP comes with a Firewall, but a better free Firewall is from Zone Labs and is called ZoneAlarm: http://www.zonelabs.com/ . This is a full-featured firewall. The only
issue (which is really no problem) is a prompt appears when an application tries to access the Internet; however, once access is allowed, the application is registered canceling future prompts.
Spyware and ad ware is everywhere and can really degrade the performance of your PC. A free program that is just as good as any commercial program is Ad-Ware SE personal by Lavasoft:
http://www.lavasoftusa.com/software/adaware/ . This software provides protection from trojans, known data-mining, aggressive advertising, dialers, malware, browser hijackers, and tracking components. I run it
weekly and it can be configured to automatically check for free updates to its spyware database.
Just as we do periodic house cleaning to keep the house from cluttering up, we also need to clean our PC of temporary and orphaned files that tend to accumulate over time. An excellent tool to clean your PC now and then is CCleaner:
http://www.ccleaner.com/ . It is configurable to clean what you want and will even clean your Registry.