anti-virus

[black rover]

Hi, Bought a second-hand laptop,then had it cleaned up & had windows 2000 installed. Would like to know of a free download & installation for firewall,anti-virus & pop-up prevention please,or some advice. Thanks.

[Connor.]

Good antivirus: http://www.avast.com/

Personally I use Windows Firewall and have never had any problems.

Mozilla Firefox (http://www.mozilla-europe.org/en/firefox/) dramatically cut down the number of pop up for me(options can enable all pop ups be blocked if memory serves me) although some do get around it i.e. PartyPoker.

[black rover]

Thanks for your help,all installed now.

[dx100uk]

ie 8 wil give pop up protection
windows defender will do the spyware trojans etc
as for a free firewall, you could use the windows one built in but that only stops incoming attacks
zonealarm free will sort that.

dx

[©Amethyst]

I do swear by Avast. Used AVG on my old laptop - when I refused to pay for it I got an awful virus and had to reformat the hard drive.

Haven't had any problems with Avast since I started using it about a year ago.

Comodo is a good firewall. Sometimes it can annoy me but at least it's protecting me. http://www.comodo.com/

Please remember not to have more than one anti-virus programme or firewall running. By all means have one of each running, but if you put these on your computer and have them running along side what was included with your OS, they'll conflict and leave your computer vulnerable.

Also, Glary Utilities is a handy wee programme to have on your computer, it just helps to clean up your computer, fix registry entries that have become corrupted etc. You don't need to use it very often but there is more to it than that. If you were to accidentally delete a file and empty your recycle bin, there's an option to retrieve it as it still leaves traces on your computer. Alternatively, Glary has the ability to remove those traces for some added 'housework' support.

http://www.glaryutilities.com/

[dx100uk]

can't recommend glary more highly.
ATF cleaner is good too as a claener that requires no install.

for a good background monitor try spywareblasterfree.
you have to manually update it, but that blocks loads of rubbish .

dx