Keep Your Computer Secure - For Free!

Keeping your computer secure from online threats is absolutely essential. It will take only a matter of a few hours, on an unprotected computer connected to the Internet,  to get something nasty on your machine.

The symptoms of these nasties can include a very slow computer,  personal or sensitive data getting into the wrong hands, popup adverts or even more severe.

There are some simple  precautions you can take to protect yourself from these threats. The first step is to get some firewall and anti virus software.

A firewall simply restricts programs from accessing the Internet unless they are authorised by you. If they are not authorised then they will not be allowed to communicate with your computer. This will stop a lot of things being able to get onto your computer in the first place.

Anti Virus will scan all your files that are on your computer for harmful additions. It will normally also monitor all files coming in via the Internet such as emails and also check files before you run them.

Combining these two pieces of software you will go a long way in protecting yourself. Although this does not give you total protection it is certainly better than having nothing.

As hackers and virus creators constantly improve their methods, the Anti Virus and firewall software needs to continually be updated.  Regular updates are provided by whoever makes the software you are using.

This is where most people go wrong. You have to pay for the privilege of getting the updates. People don’t and subsequently, very quickly their software loses its protection.

There is a simple solution to the problem. There are two very good companies that provide free versions for home users. They not only perform very well, they also allow automatic free updates.

AVG - http://www.free.grisoft.com for the anti virus

Zone Alarm - http://www.zonelabs.com - for the firewall.

Anyone who does not have this protection and uses the internet  is crazy in our opinion!

One last important thing to note, it is important to not have two versions of anti virus or firewall software installed at the same time. Download the 2 programs, then uninstall your existing security suite then install the downloaded files.