Well Hello all

This little article is to provide a basic help point for people that need help with PC security, perhaps you have had an event whereeby your computer was infected, and you had some problems. Hopefully they were not of too damaging a nature.

If you are looking for products to protect your system I suggest you look at these two as starting points

ZoneAlarm  Go to this page and select the free download http://www.zonealarm.com/security/en-us/compare-anti-virus-spyware-software.htm

 Be careful when you install and make sure you select the free installation.

 Now ZoneAlarm is a little tricky to get used to however it is worth learning its behavior, sadly some of the pop ups are a little cryptic, however this is more of a Windows problem rather than ZoneAlarm.

AVG Antivirus Now you need a good free anti virus, go to the AVG site for their free version. http://free.avg.com/

Now I have no affiliation with these products, only about 10 years of using their products and so far have had no incidents of an infection on any PC with them installed.

I hope this helps someone to stay free of problems

If you have a problem, firstly I suggest don't use anything like internet banking, it might be the last you see of your hard earned savings.

Next go to one or more of the anti virus vendors and check for an online scanner and check the system in question.

The next thing, is clean up your system following the advice of the online scanner.

Now make sure your Anti virus is up to date and if you don't have a paid subscription then remove your existing software and install AVG as suggested above.

Install Zone Alarm. There is others that will work, and as I said above watch out when you install it that you don't install the full product, select the free one

Scan the computer again and it should be free of infections.

It is possible at this time that you may hav a virus/trojan on your system that can avoid detection. Only time will tell.

Now change passwords for things like Internet banking, MSN Yahoo etc.

Finally pratcise safe surfing, dont click on random links, Use Firefox or at least upgrade to IE 8.

If you are unsure of the origin of the email then don't open it. On the idea of email If you cant use the latest up to date hardened and patched copy of Outlook, then use Thunderbird for free and you can also look at using the spamato extension forThanderbird to assist you in elimintating the rubbish.

Good luck and thanks for dropping by

Peter