Virus, spyware control critical

I think if there were a hall of fame for letters that I receive it could be on three topics. One would be virus control, one is spyware and the other is backups.

So I thought I would cover them all in one column to give people the basics.

First, let's cover viruses. If you own a Windows PC, you need to have a current anti-virus product installed and running. There's no longer a debate about it, no longer a way to be "really careful what you open" and do without it.

There are dozens of products out there for you to use, and even some excellent free ones like AVG Free and Avast. It is such an important issue that Microsoft will be adding anti-virus to the next version of Windows as a pre-installed accessory.

Once you have it installed, you need to make it a ritual to update it once a week. I know that many programs claim to update automatically, but don't even trust that. Once a week just run the update program manually. Once you update it, kick off a manual scan of your computer's hard drives.

The above may take 5 minutes, but it will protect your data. The scan may take hours; I let mine run overnight on Fridays.

With an Apple computer, anti-virus software is purely optional in my opinion. I know there are some divergent opinions on this and there's no harm in having it if you can afford it. But since there are no Apple viruses in the wild and the machine is designed to be more secure than a Windows machine, there's little risk.

Ditto Linux, Amiga and the Commodore 64.

On spyware, this also is a Windows machine issue.

This can be a far more complex issue depending upon whether you are already infected or simply trying to prevent an infection. If you already are infected, you may be able to eliminate the infection by using three or four products (there isn't one that does an effective removal job by itself). You can try AdAware, Spybot Search & Destroy and Microsoft Anti-Spyware beta for free, then add Webroot's Spy Sweeper and perhaps PestPatrol.

A skilled professional can be required to get rid of some infections. And some infections require a complete erasure of the PC and reinstallation of the operating system and everything on it.

The motto of the spyware world is nothing is free on the Internet. When sites offer you "free" software understand the payment for that software is spyware that will be installed with it.

Again, Macs are mostly immune from spyware and pop-up issues.