Firewall

[furiaa]

Zone Alarm Pro 4 combines several features within this firewall. Program controls protect you from spyware programs that secretly install themselves and then connect themselves to the internet. The way this works is that whenever a program tries to access the internet Zone alerts you and asks if you want to grant permissions for this program.

That being said, Zone does not prevent these programs from being downloaded or installed by you so it is still good to have a spyware/adware program available to regularly scan your system for infections just as you would for viruses.

Zone also includes features which block tracking site cookies, banner adds, popup/popunder and animated adds. I would suggest that you loose the "pop-up cop"... it will do nothing for you that zone doesn't do.

I like to keep my system resources as high as possible and each little program you have running is a new thread wasting these resources. I would suggest that you also get a registry cleaner to clean up your system. Every time you remove old programs there is always junk left behind in your registry that the windows unistaller does not remove. cleaning up your registry will speed up your system and make it more stable.

[camille]

Thanks again for giving me such a nice tip. I'm using Registry Medic and Diskeeper for my hard drive. If you got some advise, please don't hesitate to tell me because I'm new in this world of web.

[Mik3ll]

I suggest getting Javacools Spyware Blaster, it will stop most spyware from getting on your computer by changing around some internet settings, and the setting changes will not mess up your computer, and keep it updated because they update it a lot. Then get Spybot-S&D, it detects way more things then Ad-Aware.