Regina wrote:
>Anything else I should be doing?>>


Bill has given excellent advice, to which I'd only add that commonsense is 
your best defence. Beware of those "freebies" that look too good to be 
true---eg free screensavers, fonts, cards, "smilies", and the like---they 
often come complete with hidden malware, or will harvest your email address 
to spammers.

That's not to say there aren't many good freeware programs---there are. If 
you download them only from reputable download sites such as Download.com, 
MajorGeeks.com, PCWorld.com, Tucows.com etc (there are many others) you 
should be OK.

I also suggest using a good downloads manager which will automatically call 
up your antivirus checker on completion of each download.

Chatrooms and "Messenger" (of various sorts) are also generally regarded as 
rather high-risk areas. And formatted email (Incredimail etc) should be 
treated with caution, because of possible security vulnerabilities.

But, generally, what you have done is pretty right for most sensible browsing.

Don Penlington






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