Zone Alarm is a well respected personal firewall and there is a free for
personal use version if you are not already using that. If you are using
cable/DSL I strongly suggest that you also use at least a cheap "internet
router" to protect your network to mitigate the risk of a software firewall
being misconfigured or disabled. As far as antivirus I can't make any
particular recommendation but suggest you post in the home security
newsgroup for opinions there. I use the free for personal use version of AVG
on a couple computers and it works well and is not a package that uses a lot
of resources and tries to take over everything I do on the computer like
some of the current packages. That and AdAware SE do a very good job for me.
The first link below also has a lot of good information for you including
the importance of keeping current with critical security updates from
Microsoft. Also be sure to backup your data that you can not afford to lose
to cdrom/DVD as you can always rebuild a computer but precious data may be
gone forever. If you have an imaging program like Ghost [or can buy one
reasonably priced] I suggest that you make an image of your system partition
after you do the fresh install including any service pack, security updates,
and core applications. It is also a good idea to have at least a couple
partitions on your hard drive with at least one being larger than the system
partition. Having multiple partitions makes it much easier to reinstall the
operating system in which case you would not need to format other partitions
that may have your data/media files. --- Steve
http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/protect/windowsxpsp2/Default.mspx
--- Protect Your PC tips
http://free.grisoft.com/doc/1 --- AVG free
http://www.lavasoft.de/software/adaware/ --- AdAware SE
http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/default.mspx --- TechNet Home
Security link
