Securing your home computer for free
Posted on December 26, 2004
This post is primarily for a friend of mine, but I’m putting it up here in case it would interest anyone else. This comes from a personal experience that I am currently undergoing (as in right now) with reformatting my wife’s computer to make it all new and sparkly again. So if you have a Windows XP computer at home and you want to make sure it is secure, do this:
Operating System
(this part may not be free)
Make sure you have a legal copy of Windows XP (Home or Professional) as many of the registration keys going around won’t upgrade to SP2 (service pack 1) correctly. (At least I assume they won’t, as this was the situation with SP1).
By far the cheapest way to get a legal copy of Windows XP is to have a student around (yourself, your children) so you can buy a academic priced version. For example here is a copy of Windows XP Professional for $AU122.95. Most households with school age children should be able to legally purchase academic copies of Windows XP, as shown here.
Windows Update
Make sure that your computer is completely up-to-date with service packs by visiting Windows Update and installing all the critical updates. You should be doing this even if you are on dialup — it doesn’t take as long as you think.
Once you are completely up-to-date, ensure that future updates will be downloaded and installed automatically using the Security Centre (found in Control Panel) introduced in XP SP2.
Firewall
For home use the firewall included in XP SP2 should be adequate. It is also managed using the Security Centre mentioned above.
Anti-virus
If you don’t already have an antivirus software, the Security Centre will warn you of this. To get a free antivirus program for home use, try Grisoft AVG Antivirus Free Edition. I hace been using it for a few months now, and it works well. It has all the important features you should require, such as email scanning, just-in-time file scanning, and automatic updating. Once you have installed AVG, the Security Centre should be happy.
Spyware/Adware Problems
Once you have got your computer up-to-date with critical updates and the firewall up and running, you should be reasonably safe from a large amount of spyware and adware. However, if you are not careful about installing strange software, you could still have problems. I normally use AdAware by Lavasoft to detect and remove these programs, but Spybot Search and Destroy also has a good reputation. One issue you may have with these programs is that the databases of programs to remove are not automatically updated, so you should run an update before any scan to ensure that you find all the problems. DON’T use random “spyware removal” programs you find around the web (particularly in web-advertising) as they may be a source of spyware themselves. The two programs I recommend here are reputable, but I cannot vouch for any other programs at the moment.
Browser
There is a fair amount of talk going around at the moment about how you cannot browse the web securly using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (the default web browser in Windows), and while there is some truth to the matter, providing your critical updates are kept up-to-date (see above) you should be reasonably safe. However, there is a better alternative to Internet Explorer, both in security and usability: Mozilla Firefox. If you want one (non-security) reason to use Firefox I would nominate tabbed-browsing, which allows you to load many pages in the background without leaving the current page. Once you have finished the current page, all the links you clicked are available for reading, already loaded. Give it a go, and you won’t be able to go back.
Ok, I think that is it. Thanks for listening to me rambling on.
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