Software tools for your computer that protect against viruses, email spam, adware, and all other nastiness abound. There are many products to choose from…way more than we can possibly review here. There are now many mainstream quality protection suites that will all do an admiral job protecting your computer. In fact, the makers of this software have finally come to recognize that more and more households have more than one computer. Nowadays it is not uncommon at all to buy one antivirus/spam blocker/adware removing suite for your computer and be legally allowed to use it on up to three or more computers!

The most important of the software to have running on your computer is an anti-virus program. These come as stand alone products as well as part of an integrated protection suite. These programs are constantly on guard for software that attempts to do bad things to your computer and will stop them before they do (like erasing your hard drive, disabling parts of your operating system, transmitting personal information to others, etc.). It is important to note that these programs are not perfect in this regard, but they should be considered as part of your basic defense strategy.

You should also know that even the best security software in the world cannot save you if you do not learn a few things about how hackers (or Anti-Programmers as we call them here on MyComputerPaladin) try to deceive you. There is a good analogy here. For your home, you might install an extremely strong door and set of locks, but all of that will be for naught if you open the door to a stranger who means you harm. In the same way, the Anti-Programmers will try to trick you into “opening the door” to your computer, regardless of how good your protective software is, and letting them do their dirty work upon your machine.

MyComputerPaladin will be adding information and training over the coming days to help fortify you against these kinds of “human nature” attacks, but for now it still makes sense to set yourself up with a decent protection suite of software.

For now we are going to focus on two kinds of software tools:

• Protection software
• Diagnostic/Repair software

Protection Software

Protection software guards your computer against one or more of the following:

• Viruses - Programs that do bad things to your computer and also spread themselves to other computers within reach
• Trojan Horses - Programs that say they do one thing (and just might do that thing they say they will) but also do something undesirable as well (like delete your hard drive data, install a keyboard logger to steal user names and passwords, etc.)
• Worm programs - programs similar to Viruses but exploit a weakness in your operating system or other installed software to gain unlawful access to your computer
• Email spam - email sent to you that you did not ask for (unsolicited) that may carry a virus, trojan horse, or just plain annoying and/or inappropriate (sexually, racially, etcl) information that you would rather not see.
• Adware - Software that “gets its hooks” into your computer and then starts opening your web browser and forcing it to pages not of your choosing. This is particularly bad when the adware starts opening up web pages to inappropriate sites (such as rated XXX sites)

Some popular protection suites are shown below. For your convenience you can click on any of the products shown to see more detailed information, including customer reviews. You can even purchase these products and have them shipped directly to your door!

Click here for an even larger list of security software products!
 

Diagnostic/Repair Software

Diagnostic/Repair software is used for the following:

• Testing your computer’s hardware (memory, processor, hard disk, etc.) for problems
• Fixing as many problems as possible that were discovered during testing
• Improving your system’s performance (speeding up your computer by cleaning up unused programs, registry entires, etc.)

You can actually go a long time without ever investing in diagnostic/repair utilities. In fact, the Paladin did just that. However, the Paladin is very computer savvy, so he was able to work around a lot of problems that a repair program could have fixed as well. All in all, now that he owns diagnostic/repair software, the Paladin is much happier having it than not.

With respect to offering you options for diagnostic/repair software, the Paladin feels that some of the best tools will be found packaged with the protection suites shown above. Take a look at the detailed descriptions of those products to find a suite that contains diagnostic and repair tools as well.