Security

These are the things that you must do.

Against each of the items we list below we give our recommendations for products you should use. You can use our recommendations or use other products.
However, our recommendations for security software are the ones we use.

They are the best that we have found.
They keep us secure.
They are all available as free downloads.
And they are used by tens of millions of people like us.

Things to do

Make sure that your version of WindowsXP is up to date. This means that you must be at SP2 (Service Pack 2) level. WindowsXP2 provides considerably more security than the original version of XP.
Click here to find out how to check.

Have a virus detection program that checks your email when it arrives. If you don’t your computer will almost certainly be infected with a virus at some point. This will mean that, at best, you will lose a lot of data, and at worst you will have your hard drive trashed and have real problems and expense in getting your computer restored.
Click here for our recommendation.

Have a firewall/spyware detection program running at all times. We all have two of these programs running all the time, just to make sure. This stops hackers installing software on your system to detect what you are doing and potentially stealing data regarding your bank accounts and every other sensitive piece of data your have.
Click here for our recommendations.

Back up all your data periodically. You don’t want to lose all your records, photographs and everything else if something goes wrong – for example your hard drive or something else on your computer fails (and, though rare, they do!). Worse: somehow your data gets corrupted or wiped up by some evil person, although if you followed the recommendations above that is unlikely.
If you have everything backed up then, when you get your system working properly again, or have a new system, then you can restore all your data.
Click here for our suggestions and recommendation.