How to prevent viruses from getting on my new computer?

5 Answers

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   rowlfe on Jun 06, 2012 reply

   What you need is an anti-virus program, of course… Currently the best free program comes from AVG (which also has a commercial version), and the best commercial program comes from Kaspersky. Do a web search and your homework and choose what you can afford

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   mike k on Jun 06, 2012 reply

   Buy a good virus protection service. Also, it’s only the shady websites that will ask you to download something malicious. Be careful with email.

   Plain and simple, if you don’t know who sent it then don’t open it. NO ONE will ever contact you via email with some pertinent information that will change your life. They will contact you in person.

   Just go to trusted websites, use a web browser like firefox or chrome and use common sense. You can only learn from mistakes if you make them.

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   Charlie Kelly on Jun 06, 2012 reply

   now is a great time to do a full system backup.

   I can’t stress this enough.

   Pick a plan that you would be able to recover from even if someone stole your hard drive and ran away, never to be seen again. This is the feeling when the hard drive crashes or corrupts something.

   if you can, get an external drive (or two) and backup a bit for bit copy of your drive. Currently I recommend getting a linux LiveUSB and learning how to do this with the dd command.

   http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-newbie-8/learn-the-dd-command-362506/

   With a full drive backup on an external, if you get a virus you can backup any new documents you’ve made/saved since the backup onto the external, and then wipe the drive with your old image.
   You can have the original backup stored, and then make weekly/nightly/monthly backups in another file so that you can go back to a later time.

   otherwise: cbs.com is unlikely to give you a virus. You should probably have some protection though.

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   adaviel on Jun 06, 2012 reply

   Create a non-privileged user account and use that online. Keep the admin account for emergencies (like purging viruses). Do that before you have too much bookmarks and stuff in the admin account to want to change.

   That will block about 60% of viruses (including all the old ones from pre-2009) and make the rest much easier to remove.

   If your working account gets infected and you need internet quickly, switch to a secondary account. It should be clean.

   Running antivirus software with regular updates should catch 80% of the rest, especially if you let it update in the morning before going online. Otherwise, don’t run programs in email that say they are FedEx invoices etc.

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   Mariah lavigne on Jun 06, 2012 reply

   install an antivirus app on your computer.

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