It is well proven that you can’t navigate the Internet for a few minutes without infecting your computer with viruses and spyware without using an Anti-virus and any type of spyware blocker. is unfortunate but its true, there are many bad people trying to make easy money on the Internet, and the way they do that is by stealing credit card information, bank accounts etc.

They even inject spyware on your computer to monitor your Internet browsing behavior to bombard you with ads according to what you are browsing. spyware probably is accountable for most of computer’s slow performance, besides viruses which sometimes crash computers completely.

To best protect yourself from Internet attacks is to have a good security suite installed on your computer, just an antivirus is not enough, remember that spyware has gotten smarter over the years, and it can do as much harm as viruses, so you need to be protected against spyware too.

Most commercial security suites give you full protection against viruses and spyware, the only problem is that most of them are expensive, or require yearly subscriptions. If you are willing to put up with some downloads and some basic configurations then build your own security suite from well known free antivirus, spyware removal software.

Antivirus - AVG 8.0 one of the best antiviruses in the market. don’t let the free word fool you, this antivirus is one of the best rated among IT pros, and is well known to catch malicious software other antiviruses miss. there is a professional version which adds real-time spyware scanning, and some other features, but both free and pro use the same signature database, so using the free version gives you a pro protection.

Firewall – Windows XP SP2 or SP3 already have a basic integrated firewall that scans incoming traffic to your computer, but lacks outgoing traffic scanning, Windows Vista do both, so you don’t need a third party firewall in Vista. In windows XP you should get a firewall to scan outgoing traffic, for that you should look into Comodo free personal firewall.

Take notice that firewalls can be a quite pain in the ass for some people because they scan all outgoing traffic and pop-up warning messages for suspicious files very often, even though that file is Internet explorer. in order to avoid being popped-up every time when you open well known applications or files you should configure it properly.

Spyware Removal – Either Adware or Windows Defender. the difference between the two is that adware does not have real time scanning for the free version, but it has good rating at catching up to date spyware, by contrast Windows Defender has real-time scanning and integrates very good with Windows XP ( it already comes integrated on Vista) the only problem is that it has low rating on catching spyware. I personally use Adware and run a biweekly scan on my system.

Remember that the best line of defend you can have is avoiding visiting suspicious web sites or places more prominent for malicious software. those places include, games sites, porno sites, obscure videos sites, music and video download sites, bitorrent sites etc.

Not even the best security suite in the world can help you to stop spyware or viruses from infecting your computer when you instruct limewire to download them onto your hard drive. be careful.