Anti-virus

At home we have always used avast! in combination with Ccleaner.


Links: avast! , Ccleaner.

I use avast! as well it seems to work well, my dad has been using it for years too. Then i use comodo firewall as well which is good enough but maybe not the best ever......
xxx

I've lost track of who is and isn't Leeds University student.... if you are then the university provides a copy of McAffee's corporate antivirus software free of charge (hidden somewhere within the ISS web site, one needs a valid ISS login to complete download). It's unobtrusive and a reasonable product.

I too recommend Avast! if you're determined to use a free solution, it's shown to be consistently better than AVG and perennial dunce Norton Anti-Virus, however it's not perfect by a long way.

Kaspersky is widely acknowledged as the best out there and is reasonably cheap, i seem to recall both Tesco and the PC superstore I hate mentioning have been heavily discounting their product recently. I know it's not what you asked for, but it's irresponsible for me to give the impression that free virus scanners are as good as commercial offerings.

As far as firewalls go, you get a lot of protection from being behind the kind of home router that shares your internet connection with the rest of your household. Beyond that the most important thing is not what internal personal firewall you use, but how it's set up.

I've not had to wrestle with XP for a while, but I'm aware the Vista (and Windows 7) firewall is actually quite good, Importantly it lets you assign trust levels (like 'home' and 'internet') to every network you connect to, and automatically changes firewall settings as you change network, so you can have UPNP media sharing with xboxes, playstations and whatever, and use windows file sharing to share files within a trusted workgroup from within the confined of a 'home' network, but when you're using the uni wireless or a hotspot somewhere, tell the firewall that it's in the 'internet' zone the first time you connect and sit there happily with all the 'trusted' network functionality turned off. I've not found anything that does a better job if this kind of flexibility is required. I occasionally use Zone Alarm but I have found it breaks networking in weird an non-standard ways and frequently end up being the friendly administrator that has to remove zone alarm in order to fix a totally unrelated problem.

I remember using Comodo Firewall Pro a few years ago and finding it free of annoyances, but it's probably overkill.

And be warned that a firewall that reports the number and origin of suspicious packets that might be attacks could turn you into a paranoid wreck. Even your own ISP will port scan yo on a daily basis.

talking of anti-virus stuff has anyone else noticed the what i assume to be 'spambots'?

There are.

I keep deleting messages, but not sure I still have the power to delete users too.