You are probably here because I or a friend told you to come here, to get the liberal offering of how to clean and KEEP your home computer clean for FREE!

You should make a backup before each of the steps to help ensure you can restart your machine
after making some of the changes.

YOU MUST RUN VIRUS SOFTWARE, AND STAY CURRENT WITH THE SIGNATURES!
Don’t even think of asking people for help if you do not have virus software current on your machine. That is the least amount of interest/work a computer owner should have.

First, If you think you are contaminated with a worm, you can scan your machine for FREE by downloading Stinger from Network Associates vil.nai.com/vil/stinger/. You can also visit Microsoft and get FREE tools from them to help you scan your machine for FREE. Do this level of scanning first, as most of these worms really whack your machine into being a non-software installing beast So getting these pests out of the way is best to do as quickly and leanly as possible.

You can then use the FREE Online virus scanning tools available from the major Antivirus manufactures. I like www.housecall.antivirus.com, This one is really great because it scans your machine from inside a web browser, making the impact any trying to install software very small. Then there is this FREE Anti-Virus software package, that even offers FREE updates as well. It is called AVG. This is a total software package that needs to be downloaded and installed.  How can you beat that?

Second, You MUST have a firewall in place. You have a front door on your house, right, you need a front door on you computer. A firewall, is named after the firewall in a car, which is the wall between the engine and the passenger compartment. It is there to protect the occupants in case there is a fire in the engine compartment. Think of a Firewall as your great Chinese wall. It keeps the invading barbarians out. A FREE one, and fairly well respected one is Zonealarm. Download it, install it and take the tutorial if you have no clue on what to do with it. In essence it asks your permission any time any software attempts to use your internet connection.

Third, You MUST scan your machine for MALWARE (malicious software, e.g. Trojans) SPYWARE and ADWARE (advertising software.) This MUST be done at least once a week, if not more frequently if you browse the internet alot. These types of software, along with cookies, are gobbled up by your computer unannounced to you as you surf the web. The I.T. industry’s favorite FREE quick fix tool for just this issue is SPYBOT, which can be downloaded from many sites. An easy one is Download.com. Spybot has recently been upgraded to version 1.3, which  now allows creating registry backups and restore points during running. You have to download this software, then install it, and then run it, use the check for upgrades option and download ALL upgrades. It will shut itself down and restart, and then you can scan your computer for, at the time of this writing, over 12000 different exploits. A VERY IMPORTANT FEATURE, is the IMMUNIZE feature. Make sure you IMMUNIZE and that the IE helper blocker on (“install” it.) Therefore the software immunizes you machine against the most egregious exploits.

ADDENDUM:

Spybot alone is NOT able to keep your system totally clean. Though the new version is great, especially if you install the TeaTimer feature which puts a Spybot watcher in your system tray blocking the most egregious browsing software. You must also use Ad-Aware to further root out these malicious pieces of software. Please go here to download this FREE software.

Also, if you keep finding that your machine has something in it that just won’t come out. Use HijackThis to really get to the bottom of it all.

Fourth, You must go to windowsupdate.microsoft.com and perform the system check to check your computer for the latest security patches and fixes available for free from right there. This process will take multiple trips back to the site to keep getting the next patch, because some of them can only be perfomed in small doses. I TAKE NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR ANYTHING THAT MICROSOFT DOES TO YOUR COMPUTER.

Also, the Google toolbar, some people don’t like Google, I like them, its a cool feature to have as you browse. It can be setup to automatically block popups under options and once again it is FREE There is also the Google Deskbar that is also FREE.

As well, another exploit that is used to throw web pages in your face, is the Microsoft Messenger service. This is not MSN Messenger that you may use to chat with your friends. This is a built-into the Operating system service called Messenger. This was programmed into the Operating System for system administrators to send messages to your machine directly.  By default it is turned on, but in most situations, it is not needed. It is fairly easy to turn off, use these  FREE instructions to turn it off. Or you can use either of these FREE packages 1, 2 to turn it off. Webattack is another great FREEbie site.

If there is one thing that you can do  for using these instructions to clean your computer, ESPECIALLY using SPYBOT. It is to make a donation to the creator and keeper of SPYBOT, as his project is voluntary and this way it can remain free to help others.

For in depth coverage of internet things go to Steve Gibson’s Shields Up page at grc.com. He is amazing in his ability to explain all the mumbo jumbo of internet, how it works, how the nasty people who write worms and virii do their work, and the freebies are a must. If you know what they do, and what to do with them.

I like to get my news from a variety of sources (keeps ‘em all honest) to keep current you can read news at www.dailyrotation.com or Google News.

Have fun and safe surfin’. If you found this site helpful, or think it needs help drop me a line: info@claudealbertario.info

Claude