And from another Net-friend:

(October 3, 2002):

While we’re dispensing anti-virus recommendations, here’s mine.

The best way to avoid the nightmare that is viruses, worms and other security holes is to use a secure operating system that isn’t targeted or easily targetable by virii, et al.

If you must use Windows (which doesn’t meet the above suggestion) then by all means fork out you hard earned dollars on a good virus protection program. There are actually some excellent free programs but since I don’t use Windows (and don’t have to worry about virii) I wouldn’t be willing to recommend one over another.

Even with good virus protection don’t use Internet Explorer, Outlook or Outlook Express. These three programs are responsible for more than 95% of security related issues on the desktop and simply using other products dramatically decreases you changes of being infected or attacked.

An excellent replacement for Internet Explorer is Mozilla-1.x (or Netscape-7.x). Both of these can also be used to replace Outlook or Outlook express for email and contacts. Shortly Mozilla will also include quite a nice calendar feature that is able to store information remotely so the same calendar can be accessed from more than one computer. Netscape is basically Mozilla with a lot of advertising added, so I’d recommend Mozilla which is light weight and has some great features – like tabbed browsing – that make working in a web browser all the easier.

Eudora is also a good replacement for Outlook or Outlook Express if you want a standalone email client.

Other things you can do is turn on file extensions in Windows Explorer. Many virii try to fool you into thinking they are one file type when really they are another. For example you might receive and attachment that is called ‘My Holiday.doc.scr’ but because Windows isn’t displaying the file extension you think it’s a Word documents and not a screen saver (which is really just another type of executable program in Windows).