How Can I Keep My Computer Clean of Viruses and Other Infections?

Posted on: April 3rd, 2009

There is no 100% proof method but I will give you advices here that can significantly lessen the chances of you computer getting infected.

Here’s couple tips from another article on this website: Keeping Your Computer Healthy

“Do not use filesharing softwares (such as BearShare, LimeWire, eMule, Shareaze, etc). These – aside from encourage illegal activity (sharing of copyrighted materials without the owner’s consent) – are an “excellent” sources of viruses and other malware.

“Do not install toolbars unless you really need them. Toolbars are rarely useful, they take up space on the screen and many times they mess with the way web pages are displayed thus causing problems. Firefox, Internet Explorer, or other browser without toolbars is the best way to view web pages.

“Do cleanups and optimizations about once a month. There’s an excellent, and free tool called CCleaner that you can download from ccleaner.com. This can clean up temporary files, also has a very good registry cleaner that so far has not caused any problems with any application. Clean up your temporary files and your registry and then do a defragmantation on your hard drive (I recommend doing the defragmentation process in safe mode — you can get to safe mode by pressing F8 just before Windows would start.”

Now, here are the software programs that I found effective in preventing infections:

Antivirus: I recommend AVG Free version (can be downloaded from there: http://filehippo.com/download_avg_antivirus
This software is suprisingly effective in catching viruses, spyware and adware getting onto your computer. It prevents them from even starting. And it’s not a resource hog – i.e: it won’t slow your computer down to the speed of a snail; however I recommend putting AVG on a computer only if it has at least 512MB of RAM because it still does need a good chunk of memory to provide the on-the-fly protection.
Cleanup: There are numerous software in this category but there’s only one that I can recommend to everybody: Spybot Search and Destroy – can be downloaded from:
Spybot Search & Destroy 1.6.2
This is an excellent scanning program.It does not run all the time like AVG, so it won’t catch the bad stuff but it’s very good at getting rid of them. It has a resident module called “Teatimer” but I found that one not too effective and rather annoying. So when you install it you can uncheck that.
I recommend updating and then run a check on the system, plus an immunization step to keep your computer free of any spyware, adware and virus traces that might not have been picked up by AVG , or your particular Antivirus, once a week.
Here is an article that gives you steps on how to use Spybot S&D if you have a bad case of infection: What to do when you suspect Spyware infection
Browser Protection: A frequent source of infections are website that peddle malicious software. Sometimes they are very cleverly crafted and they would look like the real deal. I found that McAfee’s siteadvisor is quite good in warning you about these sites.
Actually the two above mentioned programs (AVG and Spybot) both add extra protection for your browser. AVG has a link scanner that checks the search results when you do a Google, or Yahoo search for malicious software. Spybot’s immunization module prevents the know malicuous software websites for opening in your browser.
And if you can, ditch Internet Explorer and switch to Firefox. I can attest to that there are significantly less infections where users use Firefox instead of Internet Explorer.

Now, these are the mechanical protections. But, in preventing infections, the most important factor is you, the user!

Well I know people who just seems to get their computer loaded with viruses no matter what kind of protection it has. Others (including myself) somehow hardly ever have problem with viruses, even without an Antivirus loaded on their computers. The key here is understanding. Unfortunately, this subject is way too big to tell you all you’d need to know to spot a suspicious activity, or file from a mile away but I can give you some pointers:

Know your antivirus. Know how its messages look like so you don’t get fooled by some other software trying to get you to do something.
Don’t get fooled by scary messages. Real antivirus/antispyware programs do not display alarming messages. Only fake ones do!
If you get a message, all of sudden, that your computer has 1999 infections and your computer’s security is compromised, and that someone is stealing your personal information then the best thing to do is close that window using the key combination: ALT+F4. Don’t click on anything! Restart your computer into Safe Mode and run Spybot Search and Destroy, as well as a full system scan with your antivirus (you might need to go back to normal mode for that).
Get familiar with all of the software on your computer. Google is your very good friend in this. Many computers come with all kinds of crap preloaded – most of it can be safely removed. With CCleaner, under tools you will see the software programs installed on your computer. Check on this occasionally, see if anything made its way onto your computer without you knowing about it. If you have kids using your computer then I recommend doing this frequently!
Do a research before installing anything on your computer! I can’t emphasize this enough! You can prevent a lot of headaches, lost data, frustration, etc by doing a couple minutes of checking around. Again, Google, is a great source of information on this. Search for something like: “product name review”, for example if you are checking out Mcaffee you can search for: “mcafee antivirus review”. Read at least 3-4 articles before making a decision – there are always biased oppinions but reading a bunch of reviews/oppinions will give you a good idea on what to expect.
If you do that you’ll prevent faulty, or poor quality software being loaded on your computer taking up space and causing you trouble. You will also prevent downloading software that will install other things on your computer without asking you.

I know these things take time and effort but if you use your computer a lot then it will worth it hundred times over. One simple virus infection can make you lose more time and money then doing the above.

Summary

If you heed all these I’ve written here in this article then you will have very little problem with viruses and other malware.

I like to use contraception as an analogy to virus protection. You have many methods there too. Some works better then others and you can combine them to get better results. And most importantly: none, even the combine methods, will give you a full, 100% protection. But you can get real close to 100%!

Keyword: virusprotection