What do you do to protect your computer from being infected by a virus??
By huss_iitb
@huss_iitb (171)
India
May 8, 2007 4:36am CST
Internet threats and risks are prevalent in the online world.
Viruses, worms, Trojan horses, spyware, hackers and other malicious code can cause minor annoyances to large-scale damage on computer users’ PCs or even their personal identity.How have online threats affected you and what steps do you take now to protect your systems?
2 responses
@PsychoDude (2013)
• Netherlands
8 May 07
Well, recently already gave an answer to that question as well so let's bring that one up again since not much has changed yet.
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Want to be safe? Use the alternative. It is not full-proof, but there is a lot less interest for malicious software to use it.
So for a browser, take FireFox, Opera, or any other non IE based browser.
OS, take MacOS, Linux, or any other not windows OS.
Software firewall and anti-virus, mwuah. I don't use it, I got 1 windows system and 1 linux system which I use mainly. Both hooked up to the internet pretty much always and neither really have any problems. My hardware firewall serves for pretty much all the security already needed when it comes to unwanted entries and for viruses I mainly prevent myself by not downloading any funny looking files or whatsoever and not using any microsoft software except the Windows OS itself and MSN.
If my windows installation starts slowing down after a month or 6 before reinstalling that's the only time I check for viruses and spyware. But in the last 18 months it has always been 0 viruses detected with AVG and Kaspersky.
And as for spyware detection I do hitmanpro.nl at the same time, results greatly depend on which program gives the result, some say 0, others 20, others yet again 10, etc. But no obvious spyware has been present in the past 2 years or so.
Only times I have ever had spyware infections was when I didn't bother installing firefox directly and thought using IE for a bit shouldn't cause any harm. Ended up reinstalling my system over and over cause of that attitude. Now Firefox is the first thing I ever install on a windows system.
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In the end just being preventive is better in my opinion than solely relying on anti-virus scanners, as nice as they are they still like quite a lot go through anyways.
