Lastly, make sure you have a current anti-virus product installed. For home use I recommend the excellent AVG Free Edition 7.5, which you can get at www.filehippo.com or the Comodo Free Anti-Virus at www.comodo.com. These free products do a good job, and you can save significantly on license and renewal fees.

Every few weeks make sure you do a full virus scan of your computer. Before I run my scan I do a cleaning with CCleaner (www.filehippo.com), a great free utility that clears out all of my caches, erases my cookie files and cleans out all of the other temporary junk. Doing a cleaning before a scan can save an hour on a large hard drive.

If you have pop-ups and spyware, get AdAware SE Personal and Spybot Search and Destroy, both free from filehippo.com, and run those every few weeks as well.

If more people kept their computers secure, there would be fewer "bots" in the botnet to worry about.

WEEKLY WEB WONDER: For the latest in computer news, head to the newly redesigned EWeek at www.eweek.com.

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James Derk is co-owner of CyberDads, a computer repair company, and a computer columnist for Scripps Howard News Service. His e-mail address is jim@cyberdads.com.