How to Protect Your Computer for Free

If you're like me, you can't STAND the thought of having to pay to protect your computer from things like viruses, spyware and adware. Well lucky for us the internet provides access to some pretty nice solutions to help protect our computers for free!

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Things You’ll Need:

• A Computer
• An Internet Connection

1. Windows Firewall Make sure your Windows Firewall is “On”.
   
   To do this, Left-click “Start”
   Left click “Control Panel”
   Double Left-click “Windows Firewall”
   
   You should see a green dot next to “On (Recommended)”
   
   Now Left-click “OK”
2. AVG Download Let’s get that FREE Anti-Virus working for us.
   
   In your web browser, type:
   
   http://free.grisoft.com/
   
   This will bring you to Grisoft’s AVG Free Edition download page.
   
   Left-click “Download”
   
   Allow the program to install.
   
   Now you have great virus protection, and you haven’t paid one cent!
3. Ad-Aware Download Time for anti-spyware / adware.
   In your web browser, type:
   
   http://www.lavasoftusa.com/software/adaware
   
   This will bring you to Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware 2007 Free download page.
   
   Left-click “Download”
   
   Confirm that you want the FREE edition of the program
   
   And once again allow the program to download and install on your computer.
4. SiteAdvisor Download Another nice free toy is the McAfee SiteAdvisor.
   
   This will install a nice little bubble on your web browser to let you know if they’ve found the site to be relatively safe, suspicious, or even malicious.
   
   Remember: Green Good. Red Bad!
   
   Just go to:
   
   http://www.siteadvisor.com/
   
   And click “Download SiteAdvisor now”
   
   Now when you’re looking through sites on a search engine, like Yahoo!, you can see right next to the listings what the McAfee team thinks of the websites that are listed!
5. CCleaner Download One more little guy I like to use is called CCleaner.
   
   This is more for maintaining your computer and, well, cleaning it up a bit. CCleaner will scan for invalid references in your computer’s registry, clean up no longer used / leftover files, and you can even uninstall programs from it!
   
   You can find it by going to:
   
   http://www.ccleaner.com/
   
   Once there, click on “Download CCleaner now...”
6. CCleaner Download 2 Then click “Download from FileHippo.com”
7. CCleaner Download 3 Now just click “Download Latest Version” and let the program install on your computer!
8. Launch AVG Test Center Now, you’ve got a nice little set of tools you can launch and scan your computer with!
   
   You can access AVG Anti-Virus from the bottom left of your screen, your desktop, or your start menu.
   
   Click on “Launch Test Center” to begin scanning, either by Right-clicking the icon at the bottom of the screen, clicking on the “Launch Test Center” icon in your Start menu, or going up to “Program” in AVG’s Control Center window.
9. Open up “Ad-Aware 2007” and click on “Scan Now”.
   
   There are of course settings within the program to play with so that you can scan parts of the computer, the whole computer and whatever. The default setup is to do a “smart scan”, scanning only areas that Lavasoft sees as really needing the scans. I keep mine on “Full Scan”.
10. Open “CCleaner”.
    
    Left-click “Analyze” and let the program scan your computer for files to clean up.
    
    Then just click “Run Cleaner”
    
    After this, on the left side with the icons, you can click “Registry” and have CCleaner scan your registry for errors. (Only perform this step if you are comfortable with it. Altering registry entries can be hazardous to your computer!)
    
    CCleaner looks at all of these things and just asks you if you want it to take care of business for you. So other than a couple clicks of a button, it’s basically automated.
11. Don’t forget to rate, and comment on, this article!

Tips & Warnings

• Keep these programs up-to-date!
• Set aside about an hour to run these programs.
• Use caution when surfing the web. It only takes one bad move to destroy your system!
• Heed the warnings from McAfee SiteAdvisor! It’s not perfect, but it will give you a better sense of what to expect.